About

Hi, I’m April. Thanks so much for stopping by The Plated Poet!

Ralph Waldo Emerson once told me, “Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

The Plated Poet is indeed an experiment. It’s a way to share with friends and family the thoughts roaming ’round my head, and the provisions that have blessed my belly. It won’t always be pretty, or perfect, or healthy, but it will be the real me.

So before we get started with anything else, here’s the story behind my love of words and my obsession with food.

The Plated Poet Writes

I’ve had paper and a pencil in my hand for as long as I can remember. As a kid these were my play things. Opening up a new, crisp notebook with a perfectly sharpened pencil in hand was the stuff of wonder. My imagination took to lines of paper like a thoroughbred takes to the inside track. Because my family was highly transient during my growing up years, people friendships were short-lived. Pens and pencils, however, were steady playmates, and I could always find a spacious backyard in a stack of notebooks. There is no doubt about it, writing is just a part of who I am. As I grew into adulthood, it became clear that writing is the most useful form of self-expression that I posses. In fact, I don’t often know how I’m feeling or what I believe until words from my heart have landed on a piece of paper.

A curious thing to note in this little story is that as a child, I did not enjoy reading words nearly as much as I enjoyed writing them. Every once in a while a book would captivate my attention, but it never happened with frequency. I was a highly fluent reader at a young age, so it wasn’t because I could not decode or comprehend. I simply just preferred being a producer of words over being a consumer of them. Luckily for me, though, I’ve grown to find great joy in reading and love, love, love devouring stories of all kinds.

Being honest as I share my accounts on life and love and experiences is a terrifying proposition. It requires that I not sugar coat too much, or filter too deeply so that the truth is no longer.

Plated Poet Provisions

There is absolutely no question that I am obsessed with provisions and the preparation of such.

Provisions: food, drink, and supplies of the sort

If I didn’t have pencil and paper in hand, I was wondering what my next snack might be. Actually, I was probably wondering what my next snack would be regardless if I was busy thinking up a story.

My family unit is made up of one dad, one mom, and 5 children. No steps or halvsies – we are all 100% flesh and blood related. Mom, bless her heart, stayed at home to care for, and try to keep us all alive. Dad worked what seemed to be very longs days, 6 out of the 7. With the 5 of us young, growing, and hungry kids, meals at our home were more like a WWE match as opposed to a peaceful family gathering. My poor mother. Rarely did she have our father there to help referee.

The truth of the matter is that even though there was PLENTY of food always, all 5 of us kids thought there was never enough. Regardless if mom made our plates for us or not, we were all watching to see who got what, who got more, who got less, and if there was anything left in the pan for seconds. It was a good jab to the ribs if another kid touched your person during dinner, but oh man, if another kid touched your food it was an all out fight to the death. That my mother didn’t end every meal crying into her soup shows magnificent fortitude.

Of the many things, I remain eternally grateful for my mother always allowing me to help her cook dinner. I watched, I chopped, I diced, and most importantly I got to stir the milk and butter into the bright orange powdery noodles for mac ‘n cheese! Those moments of watching and helping mom in the kitchen gave me the foundation for knowing how to cook today (thanks mom!).

So fast forward, fast forward, fast forward, and I am a 20-year-old dating my soon-to-be husband. I let him cook and grocery shop for about the first month of our relationship. A girl can only handle so many frozen pizzas, hamburger helper, and spaghetti with sauce from a can before she must take matters into her own hands! And I did. I was bound and determined to be the great home cook like my mother. With a lot of phone calls home to mom, a ton of researching recipes, and endless hours of Food Network, I slowly figured out what it took to prepare a half decent plate of food. It wasn’t perfect at first, but over the last decade I’ve become quite handy in the kitchen.

Time changes some things, but not all. To this day I doubt there is ever enough food for the two of us even though I have prepared enough for 7, the Good Doctor has sustained countless fork injuries for attempted food theft, and as I sit here and type I have thought about what might make a good “writing snack”.

The Plated Poet Shares

If you’ve made it this far in my ridiculously verbose “about me” section, thank you for sticking in there! You deserve a bite of something delicious! My hope for this blog is to share my stories and some food that I’ve cooked up, too. It’s the best of me that I have to offer.

Cheers! (Really, go get yourself a snack!)