Cooking And Living : An Interview with Bizymoms Top Blogger 2010 Recipients Terry Boyd

1. What inspires you to whip up something nice? Does your mood have a say in it?

Mood probably has less to do with getting inspired than time does. If we've got a busy evening planned or had a hectic day, we'll sometimes just get carryouts. Just as often, though, if we've got food on hand, I'll find I can throw together a meal faster than the pizza guy could get to our door or I could go pick up Chinese. It will probably taste better, be healthier and cost less too. Regarding being inspired to "whip up something nice," the more you cook, the more you come up with quick little tricks that elevate even these slapdash meals. But full on "something nice"—dinner for friends or a nice weekend meal for just the family—can be inspired by so many things. Writing a food blog, I find myself reading, thinking and talking about food all the time. Inspiration can come from cookbooks and magazines, restaurant menus, fellow bloggers, seeing something in the store or farmers market; any place, really.

2. How important is it to combine fun with cooking? How has it helped you to come up with great yet simple recipes?

That said, getting in the kitchen can really help my mood. I immediately get wrapped up in what I'm doing and anything that was bugging me seems to fade away.

3. Is cooking a family affair in your home? If it is so, how does it happen?

My wife is an amazing cook. Watching her in the kitchen over the years is one thing that got me cooking more and learning how to be better at it. Most often, one or the other of us will cook the entire meal. Sometimes, though, we do get in the kitchen together and it's always fun. For dinner parties, we'll often map out the menu in terms of "you make the appetizer and the main course, I'll make these sides and the dessert."

4. You have mentioned that you don't have the culinary talent to succeed with a restaurant. If so, to what do you attribute your success?

I do say that on my About Blue Kitchen page, don't I? Cooking has taken center stage in our culture over the last several years, and we're much more aware of rock star chefs, geniuses who do truly stellar, inventive stuff in the kitchen. I don't begin to play at that level. But I frequently create things that my wife and I call "restaurant good"—dishes you'd be delighted to pay for in a restaurant. Once you get to a certain level of cooking, I really think running a restaurant is as much about stamina as anything. I love to get in the kitchen just about every day. But would I want to be there eight, ten, twelve hours a day, five, six or even seven days a week? Would I want to cook for 200 people a night? No. But I think I succeed—and anyone can succeed—by trying to think like a chef. Learning good basic techniques, working with good ingredients, thinking about how flavors work together and trying to come up with fresh ways to do things. And this doesn't have to be something the world has never seen—even the best chefs borrow from each other all the time. It can just be cooking with ingredients, recipes and techniques that are new to you.

5. Which of your recipes do your readers prefer the most?

Randomly enough, one of my most popular posts is for a traditional New Mexican dish, Carne Adovada, a kind of pork stew. I had never even heard of it before a trip to New Mexico a couple of years ago, but "carne adovada" is far and away the leading search term that gets people to Blue Kitchen. Go figure.

6. How do you deem a wine as 'good?'

We drink a fair amount of wine, most of it firmly in the value category. On the rare occasion we treat ourselves to a really nice bottle of wine, yes, we can taste the difference. But even everyday or bargain wines can be good. One thing we usually look for personally is dry wines. With reds, we tend to like big, tannic wines—Cabernets, Malbecs from Argentina or, most recently, French Medocs.

7. What methods do you use to compile brand new fun cooking recipes?

Once I've gotten the basic inspiration for a recipe, from whatever source, I'll usually sniff around the Internet to see how others have used a particular ingredient or technique. Or I'll look in cookbooks or magazines. Then I may borrow ideas from a few different sources and mash together my own take on what I want to cook. The beauty of cooking a lot, though, is that sometimes you'll start with a single ingredient and the entire recipe will just happen right in your head, full blown. You'll immediately know exactly how you're going to cook the recipe and exactly how it will taste.