Confessions of a Bake-a-Holic Exposé or Happy Birthday Megan

The life of a recipe blogger is very glamorous one. You get invited to all kinds of parties and receive compliments and accolades for your delicious creations. All the photos look Delicious and perfect and the recipes sound effortless. Almost like they were just thrown together with a few ingredients that were laying around the house.
But behind the cremé brulee and royal icing is a darker side. A side hidden from the public eye. A side they don't want you to see.

Rewind 11 years, to a beautiful newlywed bride and her clueless husband. They had both lived at home up to the point where they fell in love, bought a house, remodeled that house and then got married, all the while going to school full time, running a small business and managing a bank branch.
Never having had to shop for groceries before their marriage, they spent most of their grocery money on fruit snacks, tapioca pudding and and thin mint girls scout cookies. Eating out a lot, they relied on Sunday dinner invitations for any home cooked meals. They got the bulk of their nourishment from pizza and milk shakes.

Occasionally there was a home cooked meal, but it usually consisted of rounding up whatever was in the fridge and did not smell rotten and then either making it into a stew or some sort of pasta sauce to throw on top of over cooked spaghetti noodles. A couple of real standouts that come to mind are a neon green Lima bean pasta and a carrot pasta sauce that was choked down only because it was Sunday and they couldn't go to the store and buy something else to eat.

After the Bake-a-holic's husband gained 25 pounds in the first year they were married, they decided to change their lifestyle and eating habits.

Fresh fruits and vegetables started to make regular appearances in the fridge. Whole wheat bread replaced Twinkies. Fruiti-O's fruit snacks where no longer considered a recommended daily fruit allowance, and french fries were not considered a healthy option because they were made from a vegetable. Things really started to turn around for the couple. They added an active, exercise element to the mix and started to actually become somewhat healthy.
But that was all about to take a drastic turn for the worse. It all changed when the Bake-a-holic found out she was going to be doing a little baking of her own. She found out she had a bun in the oven. Now she was eating for two. Her husband didn't want her to feel bad about gaining weight, so he gained sympathy weight with her. Always eating double portions and having a tough time keeping up with the exercise schedules, especially when the bake-a-holic would get so sick that she would throw up so much that she would get dehydrated and have to go to the hospital for an IV to replenish her fluids.

The baby finally came. A healthy baby girl. Although with childbirth, the first 7 lbs were easy to lose, the rest of the weight was not as easy. Especially for her husband. Mix that with a lack of sleep, always having goldfish crackers on hand and having whole milk in the fridge and you have a recipe for disaster.

Fast forward to 2009.
The bake-a-holics is now chasing 4 healthy girls around and being active. She runs like a gazelle. She has been collecting recipes and cookbooks for the last 10 years and turning out food that tastes really, really good. Staying barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen for all of those years has really paid off for her culinary skills.

It is not always as glamorous as the photos make it appear. There are recipes that don't work. There are meals that don't get eaten or are complained about. Occasionally there are kitchen fires.

Sometimes there are whole wheat breadsticks that look more like pooh than food.

At times, the kids complain when home-made macaronni and cheese is made for dinner because they want the "REAL" mac-n-cheese. The kind that comes out of a box and is orange.

We have had our ups and downs which admitedly are all my fault, but I have become incredibly spoiled for really great food and a beautiful wife who makes it for me.
Thanks for not leaving me.

Happy Birthday