Let’s go out to the Hazel Wood

My name is Caitlin and I love cooking. My hope is that you will also love cooking with the help of my recipes and the occasional Yeats quote.

What makes Hazel Wood different?

Stick with Simple

My dad’s go to rule of thumb in the kitchen is don’t make it if it has over 10 ingredients. Every once in a while we all want to make something extravagant that uses that one ingredient we can never find at the grocery store, but most of the time we want something simple. Full disclosure, a few of my recipes will have more than 10 ingredients and might take more than an hour to make, but they’re all manageable.

No Meat No Problem

A few years ago, I decided to stop eating meat and became a pescatarian. Soon afterwards, I noticed that I couldn’t find food accounts or blogs that made hearty (or yummy) vegetarian food, which is why I decided to start this blog so that more vegetarians or pescatarians could enjoy meals that were more than just veggies on a plate. My family was a bunch of meat eaters growing up, but I’ve slowly transitioned most of them to pescatarianism. It’s much easier and more enjoyable than most people think to stop eating meat!

Scratch the Sugar

During the pandemic, I turned to baking (along with everyone else) and around that time, I realized that there is an insane amount of sugar in almost everything. I found this incredibly alarming and decided to cut back on sugar in the kitchen. Safe to say, I went a little overboard. The worst example of this was when I made homemade cranberry sauce without any sugar. It was awful. Since then, I believe I’ve found a great balance of using sugar (but not too much) and also using more natural sweeteners like maple syrup, honey, or even ripe bananas. This way we can all enjoy delicious baked goods without worrying about killing our blood pressure.

Where does Hazel Wood come from?

I’ve always enjoyed food, but I only recently started to enjoy cooking. There were a few things that happened to precipitate this, but the most pivotal one happened in Ireland when I was traveling with my family. We had just hiked the Cliffs of Moher (a 10 mile out and back) and were in desperate need of some sustenance. After walking around the small town of Doolin, we stumbled into a local cafe and had the best soup we had ever had. It was a carrot parsnip soup served with homemade bread and it was so delicious we all ordered a second bowl immediately. We so thoroughly enjoyed it that we pleaded with the waitress to give us the recipe even though we assumed she wouldn’t. To our collective surprise, she returned to our table a few minutes later with a handwritten note from the chef. The note listed the ingredients without any of the measurements and had a few of the directions jotted on it. Our waitress told us that one ingredient was missing and that we would have to play around with it on our own. As an avid jigsaw puzzler I was delighted, as this combined two of the things I enjoyed most. Again, I’ve always loved food, but this kickstarted my love of cooking because I spent the following summer toying around with the ingredients and directions until I created my own version of the soup. During that summer, I was also reading a collection of poems by W. B. Yeats that I had picked up in Sligo, Ireland. I appreciated how intertwined his poetry was with nature and many of the images stuck with me. Cut to a few months later when I knew I wanted to start a blog for my food and was looking for a name, I thought of the soup and of Yeats and kept returning to his opening lines from The Song of Wandering Aengus: “I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head.