Food has been the most sustained interest I have had throughout my life, bar none.  Starting from the sixth grade, when school projects started becoming more open, I usually chose a food topic.  Medieval food (twice), the food of China, the UK, the Congo– and that’s just middle school.  High school and college weren’t as pliable.  Choosing to major in math rather than something squishier like sociology put a crimp in my style, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me a way to write a math thesis about food.  I tried, believe me, I tried.  I could have probably written something of thesis length.  It might have even been interesting.  It would not, however, have contained substantial mathematical content.

So I like to read and write about food.  I also like to eat it—  I won’t prove that one, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the  reader.  But what about making food?

Cooking was not optional in my house growing up.  Many of my extended family members don’t cook, or don’t like to cook, or only cook a few dishes.  My mother has always been the person in the family who cooks a variety of things, regularly, without complaint. And we always ate dinner together, at the dinner table.  This was unremarkable to me, but unusual to just about everyone else.

Which is not to say my diet growing up was gourmet.  My father’s stomach is somewhat delicate, and so we ate a lot of chicken and ground beef based dishes.  Grilled Chicken was such a standard during warmer months that I learned to avoid going home for dinner at least a couple nights a week– which caused my parents to eat the easily-prepared-for-only-two-people grilled chicken even more.

My parents shop near daily at the deli/butcher down the street.  There are leftovers, sometimes, but not often extra ingredients.  It’s great for freshness and quality.  It’s horrible when you’re the growing, athletic, starving teenager at 9:30 at night.

I had early learned to recreate the dishes my mother made.  My father always put something together on the days my mother was at work, but he often forgot little things—  vegetables on the side, breadcrumbs in the meatloaf, whatever.  I was the sous-chef of the family.  My mother took charge, and I was the one who measured, stirred, mashed.

It took me a while to develop a cooking style of my own.  It took me a while to cook things my mother not only didn’t, but wouldn’t.  Baking from scratch when a mix for it exists didn’t really happen until college.  I was experimental when cooking stuff for myself, but rarely served my concoctions to others.

Who led the transformation?  My now-boyfriend, then-best-friend had something to do with it.  The summer before college, my friends and I spend a lot of time together, and he had more cooking experience than we did.  Chopping up raw bacon and putting it into a burger before cooking?  Hell, seasoning the burger before cooking?  I hadn’t really thought about it before that.

I started reading and watching. Over the years, I picked up Alton Brown, Ina Garten, and Lynne Rossetto Kasper as my standbys.  I don’t want to perfect any one cuisine, I don’t want to always eat healthy, but I’m not as in love with butter as Paula Deen is either.  Sometimes I want a quick meal, sometimes I want to cook all day.  To me, these cooks take a dish, and look at it carefully, develop what’s good about the dish, discover the important ingredient, the key to the technique, and make the dish better.  That’s what I want in my cooking.

Of course, I have a few other kitchen loves.  I love Anthony Bourdain’s perspective on food.  Making it, eating it, buying it.  I love Gourmet Magazine.  My mother claims it’s more of a travel magazine than anything else, and she may be right.  But I rarely cook out of books.  I rarely find a recipe in a book, and then go out and buy those ingredients, and follow the recipe to the letter.  I find something that looks good, google it, see who’s made it differently at the food network, check a few cookbooks, watch a video podcast on it, read the transcript of the episode of Good Eats it was on, THEN I go to the market, and more often than not, only loosely follow whatever recipe I’ve ended up with.  I only own a tablespoon and a teaspoon.  If I need halves or quarters of anything, I estimate.  I don’t cook from a recipe, I cook from a picture, an idea, an ideal.  Gourmet may be a travel magazine, but I love cooking from it.

But if I had to pick one person I aspire to be— only one—  the choice is obvious.  Julia Child.  Smith Class of 1934.  She did well, but she also knew how to have fun.  After spending most of high school more concerned with grades than having a life, I committed myself to enjoying college, and so Julia was a role model there.  And she didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do, either.  She did so advertising, some writing, some volunteering…  And then she helped the spies.  And traveled in Asia.  And moved around Europe.  And eventually, eventually, found something she loved and wanted to share— French Cuisine.  I’m not big on French Cuisine-  too much butter and cream overwhelm me, even when I have copious amounts of lactaid.  It’s fussier than I can deal with.  But she lived life.  Why wouldn’t you want that for yourself?