My history of life (and food)

I have loved food and have been cooking for as long as I can remember. For as far back as I can recall, Sundays were the highlight of my week. My father and I would make breakfast for the entire family (6 kids + 2 parents = 8 mouths and sometimes more if one of us had a sleepover!). He taught me how to make pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse, dinosaurs, E.T. and various other things which were awesome at the time, but I now realize they were actually pretty simple. As I grew into my pre-teens, I became obsessed with PBS and watching cooking shows. Mom didn't really let me cook much because she was scared I'd light the house on fire, as I was always a bit of a klutz, and still am today. I used to love fondue night growing up because I absolutely loved being able to cook my own dinner. Mom mostly cooked out of necessity, she made quick and easy (and bland) meals because she really didn't have much time to slave over the stove when she had 6 kids all in different sports and never all at the same school at the same time due to the vast range in ages between the oldest and the youngest.

My parents always tried to instill in us the value of giving things a chance, and trying new things. We often went out to dinner and occasionally tried new cuisines. I remember my favorite was going to Benihana's! Watching the chef was mesmerizing, the quickness of the knives, the steam from the grill, I was sold ... I was going to be a chef. As I went through high school, I was put on the path towards a 4-year college. My parents encouraged me to study math and the sciences and cooking was literally put on the back burner and not considered (by them) to be a future career, they wanted me to be a doctor. My senior year of high school, I had fulfilled all of the requirements for graduation so I took Gourmet Cooking I as an elective. It was truly the only thing that kept me from skipping school, as it was the last period of the day. I was pretty terrible (ok VERY terrible) to start, but by the end of the year I could bake and decorate a cake, make a mean chicken stir fry, and even flip a pancake without dropping it on the floor. However, my fate was sealed as I had already been accepted to Franklin & Marshall College where I would spend the next 4 years of my life studying Government & Public Policy.

I wrapped up my years at good ol' F&M with a B.A., some fairly good writing skills, and a full understanding of the political spectrum but unfortunately, I didn't improve my cooking skills much at all due mostly to the very limited budget of a college student and the uncanny ability to consume ramin and Easy Mac on a daily basis without complaint. I had been accepted to Rutgers for graduate school so I was heading home to live with Ma and Pa for awhile, due to the limited budget of now a graduate student.

For that first month that I lived at home after college graduation, I couldn't find a job and was bored out of my mind. So I did what any bored person would do, I kept myself busy. I typically rolled out of bed around 10am, flipped on PBS or whatever channel was airing a cooking show (mom only had basic cable) and watched the world's best chefs create masterpieces while scarfing down my Captain Crunch. Then, I'd leaf through a few of my mother's cookbooks (Betty Crocker circa 1973), head over to the grocery store and spend the entire afternoon cooking these fabulous 4-5 course meals while mom looked on, thankful she wasn't boiling yet another pot of spaghetti for dinner.

Monday night might be Mexican night, I'd make tortilla soup and a salad topped with tortilla strips and a southwestern ranch to start, followed by cheesy quesadillas. For the main course, I'd make a pan of chicken enchiladas and a pan of beef enchiladas (dad doesn't eat chicken), with black beans, Mexican rice and corn on the side. When all that was done and the pants' buttons undone, we'd have sopapillas for dessert. Tuesday would come and maybe I'd make Tuesday night Asian night and stir fry some steak with peppers, onions, carrots and the like all drenched in a honey teriyaki crafted from scratched and served alongside the fried rice I'd seen demonstrated that morning, closing the meal with bananas tempura (fried in mom's Fry Daddy) with vanilla ice cream and a honey drizzle. Perhaps on Wednesday, I'd recreate the Italian feast showcased on epicurious.com with a tiramisu for dessert. I'd truly found my passion and loved every day of it, even more than my mother loved not having to cook. However, as was the theme throughout this time in my life, I was broke and I had to get a job.

I went to work for what would be the first of many years working in the mortgage industry and spent my summer working my butt off trying to get as much overtime as possible to save and get out of my parents' house. Summer ended, fall semester started, and I was taking a double course load plus an internship. The closest I came to cooking might've been heating some soup at 2am when pulling an all-night study session. Spring semester ended and I went back to the mortgage company, but in a much better position than I'd been before. When fall finally arrived, I only had a few more courses to take so I was able to schedule those in the evenings so I could still work full-time and finally move out of my parents' house.

I left one mortgage company for another, moved from NJ to Philadelphia, and was grateful to be out on my own. For the first time, I was really fending for myself. I had some roommates, but they were guys, they didn't cook or grocery shop or anything. Over the winter break from school, I started really cooking again. I'd come home from work, call my sister (who lived just a few blocks away) and start fixing dinner. She'd run to the store to pick up whatever wine I told her to get and we'd have dinner together, talk about our day and watch whatever reality tv show that happened to b eon. **side note: this is also where I fell in love with reality tv** When the spring semester started, I only had one class left to graduate so I cooked 4 nights per week, watched a lot of reality tv and cooking shows, and really enjoyed myself. I was also a serial dater during this "single-gal in the city" phase of my life and oh man did I love going on dates to new restaurants! Almost every Saturday was a new restaurant and a new cuisine. My absolute favorite restaurant, to this day, is on a scary little dimly lit side street in Philadelphia. It is called Marrakesh and they serve the most amazing Moroccan dishes I have ever had in my life! I took my husband there the very first time he visited the East Coast and while he wasn't such a fan of eating with his hands, he very much agreed with me on taste.

I wrapped up graduate school, received my Masters degree, and was now bored yet again. I spent the summer wasting my time working at the mortgage company and spending my weekends down at the Jersey Shore in Avalon. I cooked occasionally, here and there, but summertime on the East Coast for a 24 year old girl is more about partying and having fun than staying home and cooking dinner. Winter came and it was a cold one, lots of snow. For those of you unfamiliar with the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, where I was living, I would liken the hills to those of San Francisco ... imagine San Fran being buried in 2 feet of snow overnight. I awoke one freezing cold February morning to yet another foot of snow that had fallen overnight. I walked straight into my company's HR department and stated "we have offices in Georgia, Texas, Florida and two in California. Please pick one and send me." And so began my journey to Dallas, TX. I threw my clothes in the back of my car, drove to Texas and started my life all over again.

Once in Texas, living by myself, I started cooking again. I only lived here a short while when I met Dan, my husband. From the day we met, we haven't spent a day apart unless I was traveling. Cooking for him became my passion and the joy in my day, finally I found someone as obsessed with food as me!! He took me to new restaurants to learn all about Texan and Southwestern styles of spice and cooking which I would then carefully recreate at home. I stayed with my mortgage company for about a year when I saw it on the horizon, the mortgage industry was flailing and I knew I had to get out ... but mortgage was all that I knew! Well that and anything you ever wanted to know about our political system. I threw together my resume and decided to finally put my graduate school education to good use. I began working at a new company, in a new industry, and spent a lot of time studying and working long hours getting myself acclimated in my new world, but not a lot of time cooking. Time passed, I got the hang of things, Dan and I got engaged, bought a house, moved to the suburbs, got married and then I finally started cooking again.

Dan and I have been together nearly 5 years now, married almost 3, and every day is still an adventure. He knows me better than anyone and is my favorite critic. He is always there, willing to try a new recipe I created and pushing me to try new spices and wrap more things in bacon. He doesn't blink when I purchase the Betty Crocker 200-piece cake decorating kit "just because" or when I come home with bags of ingredients, none of which he'd ever heard of before. I told him the other day that I wanted to be a tv chef and he said "ok" like he already knew it before I said it. Hopefully, this spurs another adventure for us to enjoy together.

Must run, big girl glass is full and it's not going to drink itself!