Ready...Set...Go

I feel like I've been preparing for this all my life. I remember being a little girl, who should have been spending her Saturday afternoon playing with dolls, and instead I could usually be found on a high chair in the kitchen while my mom cooked, or pretending to cook with my little utensils, and insisting that my grandmother taste air and tell me how good it is.

I've always been into cooking...well, and eating. I think they tend to come together in people. Why would you be interested in the ins and outs of foods if you weren't incredibly into eating?(almost to the point of being an obsession).

Food is inexorably linked to emotions. Scientific studies have time and again shown that chocolate can create the same manifestation in feelings as the feeling of being in love. There is an entire industry around the murky (in the sense of being somewhat subjective) world of comfort food.

So what is this concept? The understanding is that certain foods pschologically, and sometimes physically impact our mood. This can be due to the actual content of the food- i.e., using ingredients that are "feel good", so to speak. Rich butters, cheeses and chocolates, fragrant spices and herbs, colorful and fresh produce which all come together in a work of art that transforms the mundane. This can be a sociocultural thing. We tend to gravitate towards what we grew up eating; the smells that pervaded our senses in our formative years, when the women of our families spent hours in front of stoves making the food of our youth.

Whatever the reason, the truth remains that even though many of these factors can be subjective, there are some common threads in the things we normally consider to be comforting. I'm not really a food snob, who needs to create something that looks dainty on a plate (I prefer to use my tweezers on my ample eyebrows, and not to arrange one stalk of micro-cilantro laying at the perfect angle on a portion of overly fancy food that is apparently supposed to be an entree size but wouldn't fill an 8 year old girl!).

So I go back to my culinary roots, to celebrate all things I tasted and smelled and later came to create and improvise, and things learned along the way. The focus, however, is on food that looks good, smells better, and tastes out of this world.

I hope you'll join me in this trip and here's to the oldest food tradition- comfort food- made by an amateur cook- as a means of experiencing the best times of my life.