Cooking is my saving grace. When everything else in my life is a turned upside down, screwed up or seemingly hopeless, the process of cooking is the only thing I can count on as being certain, concrete. I can rely on a boiling point to always be at 212 degrees F; that a fish will tell me its freshness by how taught the meat of the body is, clarity of the eyes, color of the gills or the smell; how new the crop of rice is by the amount of dry rice that stays in my grip. There has been little else in my life that I can say the same for. It brings me out of my shell, a way I can express myself and share what I have to say in a unique medium that can be a luxury or a necessity but in the end is fundamentally important to life itself. Starting with one form of an ingredient, combining that with other ingredients and transforming them into something completely different is beautiful, evolving and creative. It continues to alter into nutrients, waste, then nutrients again for another form of life- thus circulating back to the original ingredient you started with in the kitchen only to do it all again. How can you not see the beauty of that cycle?
My interests in food, traveling and cultures have led me to this blog. I don’t want this to be another travel blog; talking about the same things you can see on the travel channel or food network. I am not just a foodie tourist, I have worked and lived in most of the countries I write about. I don’t want to review another uptight restaurant or another chef’s work. Through my stories I want to explore my experiences as a woman traveling by herself, and more importantly what people eat at home. Cooking stems from the simple fact that food sustains life, thus sustaining culture, society, government, philosophy, nature, everything that has the vibrations of life running through itself needs some form of food or nutrients. I want to study how we as humans express this desire for sustenance. What basic human need we possess and how far we dare to take it, from a simple snack in the middle of the day or a family meal to art, prestige, dysfunction, greed, political tactics, survival; all that we are as humans can be expressed through food. What it is that makes food the tie that binds us so-to-speak and where does it all begin? I am making the argument that everything begins at home, where society is going is based on what is going on in the homes of the people, and what is being cooked at home is an expression of that. We are what we eat and could be how we eat it. What people are cooking at home, how people are being brought up to think about food, how they eat as well as what they eat and how it is affecting their world and the in turn the world around them. Every restaurant, food stall, market, street food cart can be traced back to something that was prepared somewhere down the line in a household. It could be recent history or ancient- evolved from homes of ancestors. If you ask almost any chef what inspires them in creating or why they stated cooking, it usually has to do with some experience or inspiration as a child in a home whether it was his home or not, positive or not so positive memories.
My inspiration and influence has been a combination of being adopted from Korea and my mother embracing that heritage to eating at my great aunt’s house on a farm in Iowa- where everything was made from scratch to my father making traditional Norwegian food from his ancestors. I want to experience and learn more of what people are cooking at home, where the inspiration comes from and how that fits into their culture. I will be writing about these travel experiences, about the countries I've been to or will be going to, the people I have met or will meet, their society and of course the food that ties it all together. Some stories may make you laugh, some might make you cringe; and some might make you think me a crazy idiot- but in any case the life of a traveling cook is rarely boring so I hope you will be entertained and keeps you reading and more importantly eating!!
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