The Method to Our Madness

or How Cooking with Chaos works:

Once a week, Cira and Cissa will pick a dish from our growing list of food that is uniquely Rhode Island. We’ll either do the same recipe one of us found, or use our own recipes for the dish, and document our cooking endeavors around kids, husbands and life in general, using pictures and narration. We also will provide each of the recipes for you all to try in your own home.

Each entry will have both Cissa’s and Cira’s cooking experience within it. We think having a “second opinion” is important, and not many cooking sites offer this. We’ll be honest, brutally so. That’s the Rhode Island way – we tell it how it is, and hey, you don’t like it? Sorry about your bad luck!

At the end of each of our entries, there will be a picture of the finished product then a review of our efforts and taste testing. Sometimes we’ll taste test with our kids or husbands, on foods we don’t necessarily want to try. For example, Cissa hates seafood, but her husband and kids love it, so she’ll leave their words to let you know how a seafood dish turned out. Cira absolutely refuses to eat anything with cooked eggs in it, and so she will subject her husband and sons to give it a go. Oh yes, we are NOT afraid to cook, but sometimes? We just can't bring ourselves to eat the food, no matter how good our intentions!

After our individual reviews, you’ll see one of three stamps:

The green “Success” stamp is for a positive experience, cooking-wise and taste-wise. These would be the recommended recipes for you all to try.

The red “Failure” stamp is for a negative experience, cooking-wise and taste-wise. These recipes we would caution against trying based on our experience.

The blue “Average” stamp is for an experience that didn’t exactly work out for either cooking-wise and taste-wise, and we felt it didn’t merit either Success or Failure, but we would probably try again and suggest to our readers to try, barring our warnings from the experience.

So that’s the method to our madness. We hope you will enjoy the recipes we share. We’re excited to bring the wicked awesome tastes of our home state to the rest of the world. There’s a lot of things about Rhode Island cuisine you can’t get anywhere else….until now!