Welcome!

Welcome to Hectic-Kitchen, where we’re helping make it a great day in the kitchen!

We’re glad that you’ve discovered us. We are really excited to be starting Thanksgiving Week 2013 with the rollout of our brand new site about everything related to your kitchen, including cooking, baking, entertaining, meal planning, shopping…you get the idea. We hope to become one of the places that you visit to be inspired. We want to become a community where we’re all helping each other make better “kitchenaires”.

So…what’s the idea behind Hectic Kitchen?

Food and eating are a part of daily life. In our fast-paced, on-the-go lives we often don’t have time to eat the best food. We’re not just talking about healthy food, but food that’s good for both the body and the soul. From microwaving pizza rolls, to whipping up some Mac ‘n Cheese, to grabbing a fastfood meal, we’re constantly rushing around…and not really enjoying what we eat.

How many times have you done that and not actually felt satisfied. You know, the kind of meal where you’re foraging through the cabinets for something else to eat ten minutes after clearing your plate or pitching the fastfood wrappers?

Our goal is to help you find ways to fit your kitchen into your hectic lifestyle. We hope to introduce you to new ways of doing things, new foods, and even some old foods done new ways. We want to help you to start thinking of the kitchen as somewhere you don’t mind being, maybe even somewhere that you enjoy. We’re talking about making it a GREAT day in the kitchen…not just an OK day.

Quite frankly, the internet is full of websites with recipes. There are even meal planning websites. There are others that help you shop more economically or with more health-conscious decisions in mind. There are websites that cater to new cooks, old cooks, skilled cooks, and even gourmet chefs.

We find ourselves grabbing recipes from all over the place and adding them to our collections. We have hardbound cookbooks, printed recipes, recipe cards, electronic cookbooks, tagged recipes, and even scanned recipes. It’s embarrassing to realize that as this project began we filled an entire ROOM with all the recipes that we have. Yet how many are in regular use. Just a handful. And that’s too bad, because there are gobs of really great recipes that never see the cooktop. I’m willing to bet that’s true for you too. So one goal of Hectic-Kitchen is to broaden our repertoire of usable recipes. Daring to experiment and enjoy new foods is going to be part of the adventure.

Why “Hectic”?

Hectic-Kitchen is part of a family of information sites that include my blog (www.hectic-dad.com), as well as future sites about fitness, technology, humor, work-life balance, and family life in general. So part of the reason for the “Hectic” name is simply for branding. Hectic-Kitchen is part of iip Group’s Hectic ecoSystem of information properties.

More importantly, we’re using the term “hectic” to pay homage to the fact that so many of us are living a fast-paced life where we have to balance work, home, sports, volunteer work…you name it, we’re trying to do it. We’ve got kids that we’re running from activity to activity, parents to take care of, pets that need attention, not to mention all the other responsibilities that each of us takes on. It’s crazy, wild, frustrating…in a word, “hectic”.

We’re developing this website to help everybody who cooks. We want a new cook to feel as comfortable as an old hand. We want the recipes to be complete, but not so regimented that you tire of them. We want Hectic-Kitchen to be the go-to site for anybody who wants to cook, make great meals, and enjoy the process. We want people to be able to learn, exchange ideas, and share recipes. We want you to know that you can find a recipe that will meet your needs. Sometimes that means a recipe that you can whip up quickly with what you have on hand in your hectic kitchen. Sometimes it means something that will please the picky eaters in the house without boring the rest of the family night-in and night-out. We don’t want you to feel guilty because you are actually living…we want to help you eat (and live) better.

Let’s get started?

So welcome to Hectic-Kitchen! We look forward to meeting you, sharing the knowledge we have, and learning about you and your kitchen adventures. We hope you’ll visit often. Our goal it for Hectic-Kitchen to be an extension of your own household…making it a great day in the kitchen. We’d recommend checking out our blog for more information.