Welcome to A Girl and Her Kitchen, where I've made the concerted effort to gather together ingredients from the corners of the earth, in order to make them more accessible to the home cook! I don't expect you to use every ingredient on this list, but for the sake of research, I've done my best to do just that! I won't recommend a recipe I haven't tried, and all the photos and videos you'll find on this site were taken by yours truly. This is first-hand knowledge, and I hope that it will help you along your culinary journeys. Think of this site as a dictionary of ingredients, a place to look up and learn about that strange spice that your recipe is asking for, a resource where you can learn more about that interesting vegetable you saw at the Farmer's Market before you go shelling out the money to try it! Obviously, the list will never be completely, well, complete, but it will constantly be updated as I find and use more exotic ingredients. If they're hard to find, I'll provide resources on how to obtain them. If they are difficult to prepare, I'll provide concise instructions on that as well. And, if there's something you're just dying to learn about, send me an email and I'll move it to the top of the list!

This idea was born out of a blog I started in January of this year (2011). I wanted it to be more than just instructions for one meal at a time, I wanted it to help hundreds, thousands, lots and lots of people at once. The blog is great, and no worries, I will certainly continue to post to it daily, but it doesn't help everyone all of the time. If you don't eat meat, then none of the posts about lamb and beef are interesting to you. If you dislike seafood, then, well, you're out of luck on those posts as well. That's where A Girl and Her Kitchen comes in! Every visitor to this site will find something he/she is looking for, whether it be a recipe for pesto or a tutorial about the different cuts of beef.