As you can see, I’m—well—under the weather. I was up way too late the other night, reading a Donald Westlake mystery [Nobody Runs Forever, written under his pen name Richard Stark—quite gripping], so I originally chalked up feeling lousy to fatigue.

But on the way home from work, I realized I didn’t want to eat the pasta dish I was planning to cook for this week’s post. I wanted soup. And I figured out the scratchy throat was a sign this was more than lack of sleep.

Good soldier that I am, I started thinking about what kind of soup I could make for this week’s post instead. Then I realized the kind of soup I was up to making involved a can opener and a saucepan. And any interest in setting up my camera to photograph food was displaced by an interest in fluffing up pillows and hunkering down.

So the kitchen is closed this week. Sorry. I’ll be back next week with the planned pasta.

I really try to keep politics out of Blue Kitchen. At first blush, this post may seem political in nature, but it’s not. It’s about something much bigger.

An extraordinary thing happened yesterday. Americans went to the polls and elected a black man as the next president of the United States. Just as amazingly, earlier in the campaign, it looked as if we were poised to elect our first woman president.

For far too long now, our national politics have been about what divides us as individuals, what makes us different, instead of what brings us together as a people, what we have in common. And if ever there was an opportunity for what divides us to define an election, this was it. Race and racism have a long, sad history in this country. In fact, racism has been called the wound that will not heal. The notion that a majority of us could move beyond that and actually elect a person of color required a cockeyed optimism in our fellow man, a huge leap of faith.

Once the selection of the two candidates was decided, race was the elephant in the room. The thing no one felt comfortable discussing, but that would not be denied. It was couched in terms of demographics, the Bradley effect and even the anti-Bradley effect. There was the expected fair share of hatred and bile, scary stories and incidents. But there were hopeful moments too, even if some were left-handed. Our daughter Claire told us of having breakfast in a pancake house in a traditionally white neighborhood in St. Louis and overhearing a boisterous conversation from a table of old, white-haired white ladies. They were complaining bitterly about being compelled to vote for Obama, but knowing that they must, because they believed in what he stood for. Like it or not, they were overcoming long held beliefs and, albeit reluctantly, fulfilling one of the dreams in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As you listened to people talking, watched people’s faces, felt the incredible energy the upcoming election was stirring, you could feel us turning our backs on Us vs. Them thinking and once again becoming “We the people.” A mix of things brought this about, I think. Yes, some extraordinarily difficult times have us heeding Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that “We must hang together, gentlemen… else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” But just as much, it was the message of unity at the heart of Obama’s campaign: “We aren’t Red States. We aren’t Blue States. We are the United States.”

Whatever your politics, an important thing happened yesterday. We weren’t white Americans. We weren’t African-Americans. We were Americans. Once again, we became “We the people.” And for the first time in a very long time, I once again feel that America can do anything.

Blue Kitchen has moved! After a long time planning, a few weeks of wrestling with code and more than a couple of major panic attacks, here I finally am.

And here you are! Welcome. You’ll find some new things here, but let’s start with what’s the same. It’s still me in the kitchen, with Marion occasionally filling in and making something wonderful. As always, you’ll find at least one new recipe each week, complete with the often convoluted stories they seem to inspire. All the old recipes are here too. You can find them in the Search box [as always] or in the Archives, which—okay, here’s something new—have a tab and page of their own now, up at the top.

So what else is new? Well, take a look to the right. There are now two sidebar columns with more links and resources for home cooks. Besides my blogroll of great cooks and entertaining writers, you’ll find expanded resources like links to online food magazines. You’ll also find a new section of links called Wine and Drink: Blogs and Resources. I’ve just gotten started here—this list will grow. As will the whole new site.

And each week, you’ll find two posts instead of one. I’ll start with a recipe post, of course. Most of you are here for the food. But directly below it, you’ll find another story, usually related to food, drink, health and other life matters. Sometimes, though, I may take off on some wildly divergent tangent.

So what’s missing? I’ve reluctantly pulled the plug on my two sidebar blogs, WTF? Random food for thought and What’s on the kitchen boombox? As much as I loved writing them, they just never got the kind of readership that warranted keeping them going. The second weekly post I mentioned above will pretty much take the place of WTF?, although in a more food-focused, less random sort of way. And every once in a while, when the right piece of music catches my ear, the kitchen boombox will turn up there. In the meantime, for the 2.3 loyal fans of these dear departed blogs, I’ve not deleted them. You’ll find links to them over to the right too.

So now what? Keep coming back. Bookmark this new site. Subscribe for RSS feeds or email updates. And watch for future tweaks and refinements—I’m just getting warmed up.

Photo credit: Walker Evans, Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama. 1936.