Q&A II

[pantryslut]

maliceangst sent these in via email, but offered to let me use them here:

How'd you end up in Oakland? When did you become such a foodie, or were you always one and I didn't notice? What happened during the past ten years or
so?

How I became a foodie:

The year after I moved away from East Lansing, I had a cholesterol test that came back a little high. I knew I wasn't eating well at that point anyway -- I knew how to fend for myself foodwise, but it was burgers and shit like that, mostly. You know, bachelor food. Not a good diet for lowering cholesterol.

And i occurred to me that I didn't like meat much anyway, so why was I spending all this time cooking it? So I decided to teach myself to cook -- more specifically, to cook vegetable-based foods. I didn't turn vegetarian, but I did buy a lot of vegetarian cookbooks.

And so it was that I learned the joys of fresh produce. That was Phase 1.

Phase 2 was when I met my friend Aaron, who still lives in Chicago (and sometimes reads this journal -- hi!). Aaron is one of those people who approaches anything they do with an intense academicism -- not the bad kind, the good kind, the "let's pull this apart and see how it works" kind. He was teaching himself how to cook Asian food. (Later he would gravitate to South Asian cuisines, but at this time he was all about Chinese and Thai.) I ate a lot of his food. He ate a lot of mine. We talked a lot about food -- even food we didn't like to eat, like the roots of Russian cuisine. We talked techniques and flavor combinations and all sorts of shit like that.

Phase 3 grew out of that -- my friend Heather moved into a cooperative house and I ended up hanging out in their huge basement kitchen a lot. Sometimes I cooked dinner for the house, sometimes just for her and Aaron. Being the kind of alternative cooperative types that they were, they sometimes thought a lot about food from a different perspective -- you know, a hippieish one. Not that this is a bad thing, because it makes you aware of a lot of stuff you might not otherwise think about.

And then there was Phase 4, in which I moved to the Bay Area and got hooked up with a CSA farm (CSA=Community Supported Agriculture. This note is for maliceangst in particular, since the rest of you have already heard it all by now). That's a box a week of vegetables for seven years now. It results in intense, seat-of-the-pants culinary creativity, at least for me. I love it.

And that's how I became a foodie.