Food, cooking, eating, and me

I love to eat, and I love to cook.

That love has brought me a bookcase full of cookbooks. It has taken me through to a Culinary Arts degree. It has brought me to the point where I love to play with recipes and experiment until I master some technique or perfect a recipe list.

I remember as a person in college, loving to cook, but finding many recipes that just didn’t seem to work for me. My bread used to come out heavy and tough. Looking back, I’m not really sure why, nor what happened to change that. In cooking school I took baking courses, which was undoubtedly a major factor. But one thing I feel is that it is important to become one with the process. Only then can you help it evolve.

As a kid, I lived in a household that was all natural. My mother was totally fanatical about this. We bought all kinds of organic foods back when it was in no way trendy or fashionable. We ate, as a snack, medicinal-tasting bars masquerading as “healthy candy”. Nowadays these things are sold at a premium price, with names like “power bars”. I don’t eat them. I eat food, not medicine. If you need to take into consideration the health-bestowing qualities of a food when you judge its edibility, as far as I’m concerned it’s inedible, and I won’t eat it.

Finding that first wheat and now dairy do not agree with me has made things more challenging. I still feel, as I always have, that we should concentrate on the good things we have to eat, rather than buying nasty or inferior materials as substitutes for the food items we no longer can have.

I have no objection to eating rice a lot. I don’t like most store-bought cookies, and I’m finding that gluten-free homemade cookies can be better than the best store-bought cookies, as good as their homemade wheat flour counterparts, so long as you have the right recipe.

My quest is to find, to develop those recipes and print them here. Be seeing you.