Everybody eats. This is a blog for everybody.
I have no idea where my passion for food was born. I don’t come from a rich history of family chefs. I wasn’t raised on particularly exquisite cuisine (although both of my parents were great at what they did cook). I spent my childhood and adolescence wrinkling my face at every dish put in front of me, uttering profanities at anything with flavor. Pepper terrified me. Spinach literally made me sick. Vegetables were French fries and tomato ketchup.
Ironically, this may actually be why I love food so much now. I can’t say that there was a moment in my life when my taste buds actually woke up and I had a new 5th sense, but I do remember some stepping stones. Dragging my feet around Western Europe for a year in my early 20′s bred a certain craftiness in me. I couldn’t afford a haircut for a year and I certainly wasn’t eating in any restaurants with this so called “table service” (at least, not on my own dime!). Fortunately for my free-loading ass, European food markets and street vendors are unparalleled in their quality and abundance.
Learning to make a kind of Egg Foo Young in exchange for a bed in Barcelona; wolfing down Vacherin Mont d’Or like it was a Kraft cheese string as a guest in Lyon; wafting the scent of Haggis baked in yellow pepper like it was a chemistry experiment before I tore through it in Inverness. These new floozies made an honest man out of me.
With a new appreciation for taste, but next to no knowledge of food, I started experimenting with meals in college and pumping up my palette, 3 sets of 15 reps, 5 times a week. I started to develop some culinary intuition. When you’re guessing, disappointment should be reserved if the final product does not taste like the sum of its parts. Meals tasted, looked, or felt wrong. But, that’s how I learned. Since then, I’ve worked in no more than 1 kitchen and have taken a total of 3 hours of cooking lessons. Nothing to blog about. But, I’ve made a point of exposing myself to everything food. Food TV; food blogs; kitchen stores; cookbooks; textbooks; restaurants, restaurants, restaurants.
Eight years and a couple of meals later, I live in New York City. New. York. City. $#@% is this place a culinary juggernaut. What inspires me most about food is the reaction it invokes. And that is the reason for this blog.
