A common phrase in my Italian/Polish family is “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” With this in mind, I have always enjoyed cooking because it’s basically art that you can consume. The marriage of flavors and textures can result in some plates that are cause one to reconsider their lives up until this point. Though my blog will not be focusing on dishes as elegant as those just described, I will attempt to create filling and delicious meals using a low college budget.

Growing up, I was always interested in cooking and constantly found myself poking around the kitchen. Unfortunately, I was often occupied with sports or other activities to be able to construct recipes of my own. Regardless, my interest in the culinary arts manifested itself into cooking at least a meal a week for my family and frequent watching of the Food Network channel. On top of this, I have told my family multiple times that I would love to open a restaurant or two when I get older. Though I am not sure if I will ever call a restaurant my own, it’s always good to dream.

In college, I have enjoyed the spoils of a meal plan but as my time in undergrad boils down I am faced with the inevitability of the “real world”, where cooking for oneself will become common rather than the anomaly. Because of this, I have been preparing myself by reading up on several budget cooking blogs such as Budget Bytes or College cooking. I truly enjoy the structure of these blogs but believe that there is a large audience niche that these blogs do not cover: the in-college or recently graduated young man.

One of the main goals of my blog is to not only keep the budget low but also attempt to do the same with the calorie amount of my dishes. Cooking is already a burden for most people but making sure that the dishes are somewhat healthy is a whole other beast. My blog will do its best to maintain cheap, simple recipes that don’t extend the waistline.

As a final PSA, I would like to let it be known that I am no chef but rather a young man with a passion for food. This blog is for the common cook, written by a common cook. Without further adieu, I extend my welcome to The Broke’n Kitch’n.

The release of the movie Philomena has created a lot of buzz about Irish adoption. Philomena tells the story of an Irish woman who was forced to give her son up for adoption. The film shows her journey to find him 50 years later. For my family, Philomena’s story hits home. My father’s own adoption story closely mirrors  the story portrayed on the big screen. My dad began looking for his mom in the 70s through Sean Ross Abbey but the nuns who worked there were no help, discouraged, he put his search on the back burner for awhile. In early ’00s he decided to try again. With help from a woman who specialized in Irish adoption he was able to locate his mother who is now living in London with her family.  My dad and his mother connected through phone conversations for a few weeks before she asked him to stop contacting her. She was not yet ready to tell her family. It was not until this past year, when her husband passed away, that she decided it was time to share the news with her children.

Dad with his Mum and half siblings in London, Spring 2014.

My vision for this blog is to walk my readers through my dads journey to finding his mother and her family. This will include my own reflections on this experience as I get to know my new family members.  I also hope to include interviews of my family members.  as well as reviews of movies, books and articles related to Irish adoption.

In terms of how I want my blog to look, I am thinking minimalist design. I want most of the focus to be on the story that I am telling. However,  I realize that I cannot have just a black and white web page of text, that is not appealing no matter how compelling the story may be. I do plan to include photos and media. A blog layout that I find appealing and fairly easy to navigate is the clothing company, Free People. Their blog is clean, not cluttered with adds, they provide easy to follow links to various categories, archives, social media outlets, etc. Although their content is completely different from what I will be writing about, their design is similar to what I am going for.

As it turns out, there are not many adoption blogs written from an adoptee’s child’s perspective, go figure! But I did find a blog titled, My Adopted Life: From Search, Through Reunion, to Self which is written from an adoptee’s perspective. I like her writing style and the way she breaks down her story.

I want to create an all spoilers blog to talk about movies I’ve seen without holding back any information. I don’t want to write about what I liked and what I didn’t like, but why it was a good movie or a bad movie. I want to look at things like themes, characterization, and the nitty-gritty aspects of plot to better understand what makes a good movie and how to make a good movie.

My main inspiration for my blog comes from a Tumblr and a YouTube channel called CriticalHit. CriticalHit is made by two people, who picked apart different elements of the film, with a strong ;emphasis on story, -/pto understand why they did or didn’t like it. What I like about their way of critiquing movies that I want to incorporate into my blog is, that they are always up front about the standards. An example being, that they explain that the audience needs to be invested in the characters so that when they succeed or fail the audience is affected. Then they will explain why the movie they’re reviewing was enjoyable or not because of that standard. What I most want to copy from them is how they make their posts feel more like a conversation than a review. They ask for comments with opposing ideas, and frequently bring up other interpretations that they think may be valid. By asking the viewer to question what their saying, both in understand the content and literally in comments they talk about esoteric things like craft conversational instead of like a lecture or review.

Another blog that I’m inspired by is every frame a paint which posts videos based around an actor, a director, or sometimes an idea that analyse the film form, i.e. the pictures and the sound, of several films. I think often in film reviews not a lot of attention is paid to form, often because it’s hard to notice on the first viewing, but it has a huge effect on the audience. I want talk about all of the aspect that go into a movie, not just the textual ones. Design wise, Every Frame it has a style I want to replicate. The post on the home page are  simply a collection of screen shots pertaining to that post and the title of the post, which are a link to the actual content. I want my readers to only read the posts that they choose because spoilers can be serious to some people. I think visually this is a gorgeous and simplistic way of teasing a film post without giving away any content.

I hope to synthesis the style of film analysis that each blog performs to analysis all part of films, even the spoilers, in the blog I am going to write.