Welcome to the Ox and Hare Inn!

We’ll start with a little background and a couple of general notes about the place, before we get down to business proper.

Some time ago, I (being the Hare) and my good friend (being the Ox) decided to start swapping recipes. Ox set up a group for our exchange, and we started trading our culinary delights through e-mail. To be fair, she was generally much better about e-mailing recipes than I was.

A few weeks ago, she and I were talking about the group and the apparent lack of members. She and I were the only people involved, so it seemed kind of silly to have a group, I thought.

“Oh, other people look at it,” she said. “Some of my family looks at it, and some of my friends. And a few random people from around the Net too.”

Which surprised me, honestly.

We talked more, and it came out that several times it had been suggested that we create a slightly easier to browse and more permanent home for the recipes. This seemed like a fine idea to us both – but how to set it up? And what to call it?

Setting it up turned out to be easy – Ox and I both maintain journals online, and Ox has had a Blog for a while (which you can check out here if you like) and she has had nothing but good things to say about Blogger, so here we are. The name however – all we could come up with initially was that it needed to be some sort of inn – the kind of place you would walk into on a cold windy night, weary from the road, and be able to sit down at a roaring fire with a plate of good food to enjoy.

But what to call it?

Then, not long ago, I was sitting in a meeting, thinking about nothing specific, when I happened upon my Chinese Zodiac sign. I’m a rabbit – a hare. And Ox is, well, an ox. I suggested the idea to her, and she agreed.

So as I said, welcome to the Ox and Hare Inn.

Now for a few specifics.

The Ox and Hare Inn was established as a place to share food – or, more specifically, recipes. Ox and I will be making posts hopefully every day with some recipe that we have accumulated over the years.

Comments are open to everyone who wants to leave one, and please do – if you try a recipe and it works wonderfully, we’d like to know. If it doesn’t come out quite right, you can tell us that too. It could be that something got left out of the recipe (although we’ll try not to leave anything out).

The only thing we would like to say right now is this – we don’t know where all these recipes came from. Yes, a lot of them we have gotten from our families and some are from friends. Some have been found in the newspaper, some in magazines, some on TV shows or on the Internet, some on food packages, and some from cookbooks. If we have a source for the recipe, we’ll include it. If we don’t, we won’t. If you disagree with our source listed, that’s fine – but we’d really rather not deal with that here. Recipes are meant to be shared, after all. Where you found it is less important that sharing it with someone else.

Recipes will go up through the week, at least one a day from either Ox or myself. Anything you would like to see outside of recipes, by all means let us know. Tips on preparation, thoughts on presentation, things to watch out for, tools – we’ll provide what information and experience we can on any given topic. If you have a recipe that you would like to share, e-mail us and let us know.

Look for the first tasty morsels to be up tomorrow. And thanks for stopping by.