Cooking! Crab cakes with red chili mayonnaise

For those of you who know me, I love to cook. I'm not a great cook (yet) by any means, I am just learning and I live by recipes. I still can't say I know how to cook yet because to me, following recipes is not really knowing how to cook, it's being able to follow directions. And I follow recipes to the T. I never deviate, not even with recipes I've done many times. Plus, for some reason I can't remember ingredients, I always have to refer back to the printed sheets. =P

In any case, that is how I currently cook and I ENJOY every minute of it! And last night's meal turned out to be a huge success! It's my first time making crab cakes with red chili mayonnaise over a bed of wilted spinach. The crab cakes were a tiny bit dry, but the hot chili sauce made up for it, and can you believe it was just mayonnaise, lemon juice, and sriracha?

You can find the recipe here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Crab-Cakes-with-Red-Chili-Mayonnaise-107053
Here's how mine looked like:

Second Obsession...

So my first obsession is bags, my second is cooking. As everyone obsesses over which restaurants to go to and reads and makes reviews, I am obsessed with finding recipes, reading reviews on them and trying them out. I never really had such an enjoyment with cooking until I was without a kitchen for 2 years. Then when we were toying with the idea of buying a house, we decided to stay where we are at for the time being and put in a small kitchenette instead. Our place is the typical San Francisco in-law unit - small, yet livable - and surprisingly, putting in a full sized refrigerator, stove AND oven, plus a sink and full-sized cabinets actually made the place a lot more cozier!

I love it!

I love spending the time to find recipes online, watching the foodnetwork and trying other's people's recipes. I love buying all kinds of kitchen gadgets, especially from Crate & Barrel, that make life easier in the kitchen. It's the one-hour time in a day that I have complete bliss from the baby and am not working. It's a new venture for me that I think I will keep at until I feel like I've got it - when I know why you add certain ingredients to certain things and where I can just whip up a meal without referring religiously to step-by-step recipes.