My life with food.

A little background on me: I have been food obsessed/food central my entire life. I grew up watching cooking shows like Emeril, The Pioneer Woman, and basically anything that the Food Channel had to offer. I used to take mental notes on everything I was watching and test them out myself. Oh, how 9-year-old me desired to flambe something.

Some of my early kitchen adventures were successful. I recall a chocolate fudge pie that my mom's coworkers were kind enough to try and then "order" some for me.

Other adventures were closer to science experiments, though. I recall throwing together any number of ingredients in a bowl and making inedible concoctions. Flour, chocolate syrup, hot sauce, cheese, and baking soda? Sure, mix it together, and let's see what happens. This philosophy has informed my current perspective on food. I have better ideas today on what things go together and how, but I maintain the same "what's the worst that can happen" point of view. Food is for exploration; you never know what you might like.

As I grew up and became a teen, my affinity for food grew too. I wanted to learn how to make things from scratch and become self-sufficient. My brother was having a similar exploration at the time and learned how to make Alfredo sauce from scratch. Watching him make something so delicious completely from scratch and make it successfully made food seem so much more accessible to me. That Alfredo was a core memory for me, and I still make it to this day.

When I got married and we had our first home, it was the first time I had to feed myself and my spouse obligatorily (trust me, you don't want him to do the cooking). We had to shop for groceries and cook if we wanted to eat something other than MickeyD's. I loved it, but it was also very stressful. It's easy to love something if you can do it when you want; it's a lot harder when you have to do something you're supposed to love. Three meals a day, sometimes for multiple people, for multiple years can be a huge undertaking. The freedom to cook whatever I wanted, to try new things, and to have a challenge to keep our meals fun and delicious was life-changing for me. It gave me so much excitement and such a lust for food and life.

Since then, I have found things that make the day-to-day of cooking easier. The desires, interest levels, and complexity levels ebb and flow, but my love for food keeps me here and keeps me cooking.