Welcome back to BHC. Now on Substack

Bad Home Cooking decides to level up.

About 15 of you know this already, but between 2006 and 2014, I wrote a blog called Bad Home Cooking. It was a place where I could write about what I wanted, when I wanted, without editorial oversight or deadlines or minimum photo quality requirements.

I actually had a lot of fun. As someone who pays the rent by writing for other people, the luxury of being able to create solely for myself was invigorating. I built a small and seemingly appreciative audience. Who cares if it was mostly friends and family.

But in 2014 I found myself with a full-time job, with a two-hour commute there and back, and my time and spirit were thusly crushed in the service of putting “the nits,” as readers of BHC back in the day will recognize as “the kids,” (also known then as the Drama Tween and The Boy) through college. I stopped blogging almost entirely.

Danged if I didn’t miss it, though. And because I’m typically the last in the pool (Blogging hit its zenith in about 2002-03. But you started blogging in—checks notes—2006?) I’ve ruminated on reintroducing Bad Home Cooking as a newsletter for most of this pandemic year, and am only now pulling the trigger.

Could I have been writing about my experiments with sourdough bread baking since March 2020? No. Because I’m too afraid to walk through that bread baking door, and was too paralyzed with fear of everything for most of this year in any case.

But I’m feeling like I can breath again. Like I can start sharing my cooking shenanigans and laugh a bit with y’all. And with the nits launching and me needing a hobby, why not pick up where I left off?

Bad Home Cooking: The newsletter, will be the same blend of recipes, stories and tales of life as a mom, now of pseudo grown-ups. It will feature a blend of new content and repurposed old content (which still holds up very nicely, imho, thank you). I’ll share my hard-earned lessons on how to do the very basics: how to make rice in a pot. How to boil eggs. How to cook chicken. And do it in a way that might make you laugh.

Because I didn’t know how to cook when this all started. At. All. My mom didn’t cook. And her mom, being Irish, didn’t cook either. My mother taught me how to drive a stick shift and write a killer resume, but left me utterly ignorant in the ways of the roast chicken. I had to call my dad for a tutorial on how to make a baked potato—in my 30s!

I learned the hard way. One botched meal at a time. And when I say botched…well. You’ll see.

I’ll be posting about once a week as I get this party started. I hope you’ll join me.