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Nesting

There is a phenomenon called “Nesting” that some of you may have heard of, especially if you have ever had a child. Nesting is considered a point in time when a future parent prepares their lives for the arrival of a child. Some things that such a parent might do are clean, rearrange, paint, or otherwise child-proof their house, clean, re-prioritize, or otherwise child-proof their daily activities, such as giving up bad habits, or do something otherwise out of the ordinary. My form of nesting, if you can call it that, had interestingly enough nothing to do with any of the above categories, but I found myself realizing that it was nesting as my weekend went on, in so much as I was preparing in what small ways I could for the arrival of our new addition. This weekend, as I am wont to do anyway, I cooked.

Jay, you might say, that’s not weird for you; you cook all the time! Let me rephrase, I cooked everything in my kitchen; I spent upwards of six hours in the kitchen on Saturday and approximately four hours on Sunday.1 I ended the weekend with pumpkin seeds, chunks, and puree; fresh stewed tomatoes, homemade tomato sauce, and the makings for gazpacho; spiced parsnip soup; and sweet red pepper hummus and homemade chick pea burgers.2 If that seems like a lot, it is; I might as well have been prepping for Thanksgiving Dinner. I have posted pictures below to better illustrate what all I am talking about. If this isn’t nesting for me, I don’t know what is.

The fact is that I like cooking and I like sharing what I have done with others that enjoy cooking. I have posted two reviews of and discussed my use of Basil over the years because it was the first time that what I really needed in an app was placed at my fingertips. After the arrival of my first child, I have no idea what type of time I will have to enjoy such activities—writing or cooking—and that freaks me out a little because cooking isn’t just cooking to me, it is therapy.

As is also the case with my stance on physical books, I do not want to miss out on the chance to provide my child with a developmental moment in the form of a healthy love of food and cooking. What better time, therefore, to announce that I will begin posting recipes, like I post links, on this blog. Over the coming weeks and months, as I continue to nest and acclimate to the birth of my first child, I will be consolidating Engineered Eloquence into a single website, so as to mitigate the confusion over what is considered a standalone post and what is considered a link. This is especially necessary given the fact that my cooking posts will be a cross between a link to an external recipe site most times and a post with successes, failures, and thoughts that I feel like sharing about the recipe itself. In addition, I am going to try out a couple Basil integrations, almost like the Instapaper “read later” link that I append to text posts. Finally, I am going to be testing out a few Tumblr/DNS tricks that will allow people only interested in links, posts, or recipes to get to that content quickly. One immediate drawback is the change to the way RSS and Archives will work, but my 100 or so consistent readers shouldn’t be bothered by that.

I hope the changes are met with generally positive reactions and that it won’t detract from the content, as it is always my goal to put the content front and center for the benefit of my readership. Links will continue to be posted at regular intervals, but I know that my long-form posts may suffer short term, as my life is about to get hectic. Enjoy the pics and let me know what you think about the changes when they occur on Twitter, App.net, or Facebook.

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Soon-to-be Pumpkin Puree

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Tomatoes in Progress

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Spiced Parsnip Soup


  1. I will admit that some of the time was spent cleaning, although I attempted to clean in stages as I dirtied things to make it: 1) easier to move onto the next dish or ingredient and 2) easier to clean up at the end of each day.  ↩
  2. Lexi and I even made blueberry, cream cheese crepes on Sunday morning and completely from scratch lasagna Sunday evening.  ↩