Food for me is a great way to feel luxurious as a series of indulgences, exploration, and creativity in cooking. The kitchen is my domain, and I often bang pots and pans about, in addition to chopping loudly, and using the food processor for a variety of pestos, garlic pastes, compound butters, and viniagrettes. It's certainly not quiet when you come over to my household :-) But it sure is fun!
I believe that if you eat well, you will live well. It's why my husband and I are willing to eat a variety of foods that are beneficial to our diets. We don't do processed foods, and rarely eat fast food.
I started to cook when I was four years old. My first food memory is my dad pulling up a chair for me in front of the stove, and me putting on the child-sized apron he'd bought for me. He put a wooden spoon in my dimpled hand, and pointed at the pot of chocolate pudding on the stove, telling me to stir it. I was so excited and began to vigorously stir the pudding, sending little chocolate droplets all over the stove. My father laughed, and put me down away from the stove, thanking me for my help.
My father was very experimental in the kitchen. He'd make cinnamon raisin bread, homemade pizzas, cookies, and he made an excellent stuffed leg of lamb that I remember. My palate was always exposed to new textures and tastes whenever I visited my father during the holidays and summers. My mother made excellent dishes, but she really didn't enjoy cooking. She found it tiring, and it was easier for her to make the same twenty or thirty dishes in her repertoire such as Coca-Cola pot roast, wheat germ orange chicken, tostadas, enchiladas, spaghetti, and so on. She was happy when I was old enough to cook by myself at twelve years old, that she said she'd leave most of the cooking to me, and she would do the dishes.
That's how my junior high school and high school went, with me experimenting with recipes and trying it out on my family. They still rave about the pasta with roasted red peppers and green onions in a white wine sauce I did, the pesto cream chicken breasts, and the herb-crusted beef tenderloin I did one Thanksgiving in place of the usual turkey.
My cooking period came to an end when I went off to college, and I really couldn't cook in my dorm room as it was disallowed. I survived mostly on take out from the restaurants in town such as sushi, Italian, and Mediterranean, and gained the infamous freshman 15. Those delivery menus in the communal living areas in the dorm house----really bad idea to have on hand for college students :-) Just saying.
Once I moved to D.C. to my tiny little 300 sq. ft studio apartment, I was free to cook again. My creativity was finally unencumbered, and I cooked up a storm in that tiny studio kitchen for myself. Once mr.slinkerwink, who was then my boyfriend, came over to have dinner with me for the first time. I made him a ribeye steak with mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon, and brownies that I'd read about in the Washington Post called "Mancatcher Brownies." I wanted to impress him so badly that I was willing to try a brownie recipe with that funny name, and I was already heads-over-heels in love at that point.
The steak, potatoes, and green beans were a huge hit. I took the brownies out of the oven. They looked rock-hard. I tapped a fork on the top, and it didn't sound good. I had trouble cutting out a piece, and when I bit into it, it tasted terrible. I was despondent. I felt like a failure in not giving my boyfriend the dessert I'd promised him. My boyfriend raised an eyebrow when I threw out the entire pan of brownies into the trash can. I then teared up, and he comforted me. He even called his great-grandmother who told me on the line that it was okay to make a mistake in the kitchen, and that I wasn't welcome in his family until I did. She said for me not to worry, and that I was now a part of his family. I thought that was very cute and cheered up.
I still remember that night I cooked for my husband for the first time very clearly. It was just four years ago, and we were so young at twenty-four years old. We couldn't afford to go out to the best restaurants in D.C., and mostly ate in my tiny studio apartment, save for the monthly excursions to Banana Leaves in Dupont Circle for sushi. Now, we laugh about the cab rides we took to Trader Joe's in the West End, lugging the groceries up to the second floor where I lived in Adams Morgan. It all seems so funny now about what a struggle it was without a car those four years ago.
We've changed so much since then, and so has our relationship with food and cooking. Now, we can go out to great places, enjoy the food there, and come back home to cook with quality, organic ingredients. We've tried new produce that we've never had before, such as Jerusalem artichokes, which I found out to my intestinal dismay, produced a lot of flatulence, and we will not be trying that again. We've loved eating ramps and morels this spring. I haven't tried cooking with kale or chard yet, and will try that this summer.
With that said, here are my questions for the community below:
What are the grocery items you splurge on?
What's your first food memory?
What was your best food memory?