three bowls

I haven't had the chance to write about what my deal is and why I am doing this; at this point, most of the people who will be reading this already know most of that. 

But in the interest of being thorough, and because I never turn down an opportunity to write about myself, I decided to go ahead and write an About Me and About Three Bowls thing.  Today is All About Me, tomorrow will be more about the Three Bowls idea.

Sooo...what about me?

My parents instilled in me many great things: curiosity, open-mindedness, critical thinking abilities, self-reliance, love for books, movies, music, and animals.

But there was one thing that was not a major part of my upbringing.  My parents are not, by any stretch of the imagination, what anyone would refer to as “foodies.”  While they certainly enjoy a tasty meal, they are more from the utilitarian school of thinking when it comes to food. I think that both of them would probably be fine eating the exact same thing at 99% percent of their meals.  For my dad, it would be either cheese and crackers or Spicy Hot Cheetos*.  For my mom, it would probably be some kind of pellet that contained precisely the right mix of calories and nutrients.  They have many interests, activities and hobbies; food and cooking just don’t happen to be on that list.

For much of my life, I didn’t even think twice about it.  My main objectives when it came to eating were always something other than just the quality of the food.  I was either dieting (concerned with calories, carbs, fat, something), stress-eating (concerned with getting the greatest quantity of poor-quality sweet or salty food in me in the shortest amount of time) or being clumsily vegetarian or vegan (the latter of which mainly involved eating one pint of soy ice cream and multiple Diet Cokes every day until I developed a year-long eyelid twitch and nearly had a nervous breakdown from the sheer lack of B-vitamins in my body).

My interest in food, actually, also came about because of something other than the food itself.  While writing is my main thing, I still have reserves of excess physical creative energy that tapping out words on a keyboard or even using pen and paper simply don’t dispel.  That excess energy can actually get me into trouble – idle hands being the Devil’s work and all.  So I’ve dabbled in a variety of I guess what you could call crafts. 

Here’s the problem with crafts: where the hell do you put all that crap when you’re done with it?  So you have all this extra energy, and you make a bunch of stuff…and then you have all this STUFF. 

Make an L-shape with the index finger and thumb of each hand, and then join those together to make a square.  You are looking at a near-scale birds-eye outline of my first solo pad.  The vehicle I had at the time was a non-king-cab pick-up truck (i.e., no back seat) so I was dealing with a big-time shortage of usable storage area.

Needless to say, I had to figure out some way that I could be physically creative without having to then deal with a bunch of end products that needed to be stored or toted somewhere. 

Ergo…food.  While you do need some space to store the equipment and materials needed to make the end result, at least the end result goes somewhere. 

It was a good fit. 

I’ve been trying to become a better cook for the past few years, but it’s an odd thing to try to learn when you don’t necessarily have a lot of context or familiarity with things.  Some of the chefs who have taught at the cooking shop I’m now working at have expressed surprise at the questions some students have asked, whereas I’m right there with the students!  Context is all.  If you haven’t been raised around or spent a lot of time around food and cooking, it’s not just the individual recipes or techniques that you are missing, it’s also the context, the gestalt, the big picture.

And so that’s a big part of the point of this now-blog, eventually more-than-blog, I hope.  I am trying to firm up own grasp on context and want a single place to store the information I come across that I feel helps contribute to that big picture of basic overall food and cooking knowledge. 

I also apparently have a piss-poor memory for certain facts, and am tired of re-Google-searching the same damn information every single time I forget how you tell if an egg is fresh or how I can figure out what it is season right now in the Pacific Northwest.  I am hoping that the act of working with the information to create a post will make it a little stickier and a little less likely to slide right out of my mind.

All of this is done with a certain philosophical bent, and I’ll be posting about that tomorrow.

Update on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 10:07AM by Leslie Seaton

*Sorry - in the interest of accuracy, I must report that this food product is actually "FLAMIN' Hot Cheetos."  My error.  And did you know that the formal way to describe how a Cheeto is made is to say it's made from "extruded cornmeal"?  Nothing gets my stomach rumbling like the word "extruded"!  YUM.