What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

Why do I bake and cook my own food?


Let me just share with you that the more I experiment with new recipes, the less enticed I feel to even consider going to a restaurant.

At restaurants you just do not know what you eat. Most of it is prepackaged junkfood really… You pay a ton of money for someone to serve you prepackaged food that would have been cheaper if you either made it, grew it, or bought it yourself.

While I do enjoy taking a day off from cooking on occasion, it is actually stressful to go to a restaurant for me.

I have allergies so going to a restaurant for me is simply a chore to begin with, especially in our area. The restaurants around the lake here suck and are catered towards tourism and volume which makes for overpriced, prepackaged snack food that is fried in old oil and then dumped on a plate. The restaurant stuff is full of MSG. At one restaurant they claimed they do not use MSG, and their pasta sauce had it. Another restaurant was way overpriced and I was severely limited and a third restaurant, I was advised that the only thing that would be safe to eat was the salad!
I see this trend a lot in touristy areas, and to me, I value a restaurant by effort. Now, the Chinese restaurant, from which everyone always thinks that they use MSG, is the only restaurant where I do not risk getting a reaction.
Chinese restaurants used to get a bad rap for using MSG, and most of them stopped using MSG.

Why is it that so many American restaurants sell crap with MSG? It is not even a necessary ingredient!

For the record, MSG is found in processed foods, like breadcrumbs, hotdogs, smoked sausages, many sauces and dressings, anything smoke flavor, chicken noodle soup from campbells, french fries, zatarains rice products, some tomatoes are sprayed with them too. It is present in a lot of chicken and turkey products too. I can eat at McDonalds, but not at Zaxbys, or chick-fil-a.

When I get exposed to even a trace of MSG I get a reaction where the roof of my mouth blisters, my gums swell, and my throat swells, so it is not like I am playing when I ask a waiter when I ask them about MSG at a restaurant.

So, when I cook at home, bake a bread, make a cake, or what ever kitchen activity I may be doing, it is alleviating a challenge that is one less worry that I have to deal with.