It is finally fall! And while I am waiting until next Tuesday and the beginning of October to give in to the pumpkin spice latte craze, I have already embraced other pumpkin delicacies. Mainly pumpkin beer and pumpkin pancakes.

I posted the above photo on Instagram and a few people asked for the recipe. So today y’all are in luck.

Yes, I admit it. I don’t make pumpkin pancakes from scratch. I’ve tried! I have. But the truth is that Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Pancake mix blows all of my homemade endeavors out of the water. I could have sat here and shared a real recipe with you, but I want to be honest.

Sometimes I don’t make things from scratch. There are some night when we have frozen pizza. Or one of those Bertolli frozen concoctions. I’m human. I work a full time job. I can’t always devote a lot of time to prep work and cooking. I also know when to admit where I am not as strong, and baking from scratch is that area. The thought of making a pie with homemade crust or baking a cake from scratch terrifies me. OK, maybe not terrifies me, but you get what I am saying. These nerves have turned me on to semi-homemade baking (thank you Sandra Lee), doctoring up store bought mixes to make s’mores cookies and such.

But that is the great thing about this blog. Being able to try new things and share my triumphs and tragedies with you all has made me want to try new things. So I foresee more baking in my future. I mean, that challah turned out pretty amazing and certainly helped with my confidence.

Whew. Glad I got that off my chest.

Traditions are a big part of many families. In my family, food has always been a part of those traditions. We had the same thing for dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas and Easter growing up. My brothers insisted on the same birthday cake every year. We only recently introduced a new side dish at Thanksgiving (mashed potatoes, which Eric so skillfully makes). Whenever my mom deviated from those food traditions, someone in my family would pitch a fit. However the tradition that is called upon the most is one that has been passed down through three generations so far — our family pasta sauce recipe.

My dad’s side of the family is Italian and having a family recipe for sauce (or gravy as some people call it) is usually a given. When my parents got married, my grandpa taught my mom how to make it and she has since taught me and my older brother how to make it. It isn’t the most complicated of recipes. It doesn’t have the most ingredients. But it is probably my most favorite thing to make, mostly for the memories it brings back.

We’d always had sauce on Sundays. The smell of it slow cooking on the stove is what stands out the most to me. The combination of the onions and olive oil and the tomatoes and the spices, all mixing together to fill up the entire house. It is making my mouth water now just thinking about it. My mom would make a big batch of sauce one week and then freeze it for use in the time that followed. We’d have pasta one night, baked ziti another, then chicken parmesan. That sauce was the star of so many things. It would even add a little special touch to the holidays — lasagna on Christmas and tortellini on Easter. To me whenever I eat that sauce now, it just tastes like home.

Now of course I’m not going to share with you the specifics of making the sauce. That would defeat the purpose of the secret family recipe. And truth be told, there isn’t even a set recipe. It’s mostly a feel and a look sort of thing, eyeballing how much of what goes in and the proportions. And as sappy as it sounds, the most important thing that gets put in to the sauce is love.

I’ve made some tweaks in terms of the specific seasonings I use over the years. I personally think my sauce is pretty good…as good as my mom’s? I’ll probably never be able to say that for sure. But I have loved sharing the sauce with Eric over the past years and plenty of other friends and family. I can’t wait to share it with our future children and teach them the methods that I’ve been taught. And eat some delicious pasta.

Last week, I posted about the hundreds upon hundreds of recipes I have stored on Pinterest and how I organize them. While I get the majority of ideas for what to cook via these pinboards, I still love everything about cookbooks.

I would definitely say I collect cookbooks. While I vary rarely consult them when I am menu planning, I love to have them to just flip through whenever I am bored or looking for some inspiration. I can still remember the very first cookbook I got: “The Joy of Cooking.”

I can still remember the first recipe I made from “The Joy of Cooking.” It was orange and cranberry scones and I am pretty sure it didn’t turn out how I wanted it to. But that’s OK. Even back in the early stages of my love of cooking I realized that things didn’t always turn out perfectly.

Since the fire was sparked with “The Joy of Cooking,” I have since added quite a few cookbooks to my collection.

… 25 more to be exact. And I can’t stop buying them. Whenever I go into thrift stores, I check out to see if there are any cookbooks I want to get. My Amazon Wishlist is full of tomes from the likes of The French Laundry Cookbook to Vintage Cocktails. My collection has moved with me from my college apartment in Athens, Georgia to four different places in DC and back to Georgia just this year — and moving books can be a pain. Literally.

Now truth be told, I can’t remember the last time I’ve opened a few of these cookbooks, but there are definitely a few that have remained favorites over the years.

If I had to pick out the cookbook I have used the most, it is this one. I have tried so many recipes out of it. It’s a great resource for fast meals. I think they came out with another volume that I have resisted getting for years. My favorite recipes are the Mediterranean Chicken Stew and Chicken Chilaquiles.

I have another cookbook fro Mark Bittman. He is a pretty famous food writer from the New York Times. Again with the previous cookbook, this has a bunch of quick and easy recipes which are great for weeknights. One of my favorite recipes is the paella.

These are also well loved members of the collection. I have always loved Nigella Lawson (I’m sort of an anglophile so I am a big fan of her and Jamie Oliver) and this was the most approachable of her books at the time I bought it. Another book which features a lot of easy and quick choices. I loved Dave Lieberman. I am sad he is no longer on the Food Network. I got this book for Christmas and it includes one of my favorite go to recipes — garlic and rosemary chicken.

Now I couldn’t talk about my cookbook collection without referencing this. As a gift at my bridal shower, my mom made this book filled with recipes that were contributions from all my friends and family. It is one of my most prized possessions because it is filled with so much love from the most important people in my life. Eric and I take it out all the time and pick something to make and it brings back so many memories of the individual who shared the recipe.

I am sure that by the time we settle down and buy a house, I’m going to have to have at least one bookshelf dedicated to my cookbook collection. And the thought of that is actually very exciting to me.

What are your favorite cookbooks?

As I mentioned in my introduction post, my husband Eric shares my love of food. I’ll be mentioning him a lot throughout this blog so I figured it would be good for me to tell you a bit about him.

Eric and I met in 2008 but didn’t officially begin dating until September 2009. The week of our first date, I remember him posting an album on Facebook full of food pictures from a trip to San Francisco. This guy showed promise. We’ve been together ever since.

Eric is a great guy in many ways (obviously, I married him), but especially when it comes to our love of all things food. He is just as adventurous as I am when it comes to trying new things, sometimes even more than me. He’s open to trying new things that I cook (kale and quinoa for example), and his list of dislikes is pretty small (rare steak, onions, cooked mushrooms). Plus he’s a good cook too (and baker).

He also understands my desire to photograph everything we eat, whether it is at home or a restaurant. It’s a small thing, but it would be annoying if every time I pulled out my phone to snap a pic, he let out a big sigh. Ain’t nobody got time for that. In fact, I sometimes think he is more excited about photographing food than I am. We had more pictures from our honeymoon of the food we ate than of the two of us probably.

Together we like to explore new restaurants and try new things. We just relocated to Atlanta from DC in February and have since been working our way through Atlanta Magazine’s list of best barbecue in the city. In the four years we’ve been together, we’ve both developed a love of learning about wine. We got engaged while on a trip to wine country in California. Eric works part-time at a winery tasting room in Georgia (he also did it when we lived in Virginia). We got a wine fridge as a wedding present. We even hosted a wine festival at our house for a bunch of friends. I wouldn’t call us snobs, but we definitely enjoy a tasty bottle of vino every now and again.

I’m pretty lucky to have Eric alongside me in foodie adventures.

Who is your favorite person to talk food with?

Why hello there. I’m Katy. Welcome to my new blogging endeavor, Kitchen Casual.

Let’s start off with a little background. I’ve always loved blogging. I had a Xanga in high school, a LiveJournal in college and wrote a fashion blog called Thrifty Threads with some of my friends up until recently. I love having an outlet where I can go and write whatever I want whether people are going to read it or not. Once Thrifty Threads ended, I realized I was missing blogging in my life, so I decided to finally take the plunge and start a blog about food.

Anyone who knows me in real life can tell you that I’m a foodie through and through. Both my husband, Eric, and I are. We are the people you see at restaurants taking pictures of every dishes. We’re the ones talking about dinner while we are eating lunch. We both love to cook, love to eat and love to experience everything about food. Food is my most fervent passion in life, so it made sense for me to start a blog centered around it. I wanted to start an outlet where I could share recipes, tips and tricks, restaurant reviews and a bunch of other random things surrounding food. Have you ever spent an hour watching Whole Foods hauls on YouTube? No? That’s just me. Well, fair warning: I’ll probably be sharing food hauls on here. I love reading them and watching them. They give me ideas of new things to try. And that’s what food is all about — trying new things.

I want this to be a pretty casual blog, for me to keep up and for readers to follow, hence the title. I’m by no means a professional cook, but I do like to share what I produce in the kitchen. Most of the pictures I share will probably be via my iPhone and Instagram. I don’t have a fancy DSLR or anything. I document food the way a lot of people do: point and click on a cell phone.

My cooking philosophy is pretty simple. I love to cook delicious food that is easy to make and doesn’t take a long time. I love being in the kitchen, but I don’t want to be chained to the stove on any given day. I work a full-time job, so when the day is done, I like to throw some things together and have something on the table in about half an hour. You won’t see a lot of slow-braised, long-simmering posts here — unless they involved a crock pot. (Seriously, the crock pot is one of the best cooking tools around.) I can’t chop a perfect dice or create beautiful julienne veggies without the help of a mandolin. But I do try to make my food look nice. I have a graphic design background — I can’t help it that I like things to look good.

I guess I will wrap this up. Bear with me as I work through the design and flow of this site. I hope to have it ironed out soon. But I have found blogging is an organic experience and things change constantly. So let’s see what happens.

P.S. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter if you desire. I might post pics of our cat or tweet about Georgia football just so you are aware.