Eat-scapades
Anyone who knows me even a little, knows that food is one of my favorite things. I spend a lot of time talking about it, thinking about it, and of course eating it. My dad always says that if you like to eat, then you better learn how to cook. I’d done a lot of cooking, mostly learned from family, friends, and the Internet. But I’d never really used cookbooks. When I heard about a Cookbook Club in my area, I decided it would be a fun way to try out some cookbooks and meet new people who shared my love of food. We pick a cookbook each month, everyone chooses a recipe to make, and then we have a party where we eat all the dishes and generally drink a lot of wine. It’s like the best book club ever, because it ends with food. When I told people about Cookbook Club, they loved the idea and wanted to hear more, so I started a website to chronicle the monthly events:
http://www.cookbookclubfun.com
But you have to eat more than once a month! Sharing food experiences is an incredible way to connect with people. I mourn the shortage of communal cooking and eating in modern America. I long for the days of the communal bread oven, the neighborhood clambake, the local pig roast. So I seek out fun food activities whenever I can, often with friends from the Cookbook Club. I found that people liked to hear about these eating adventures too, but it didn’t make sense to put them on the Cookbook Club site, so I started this site to share what I like to call my Eat-scapades.
Gold Digging
Around the same time, I decided to do a Gold Digging project… Jonathan Gold, that is. Jonathan Gold is the food writer for the LA Times – I believe the only food critic to ever win a Pulitzer. Every year he releases his list of the 101 Best Restaurants in the LA area. I’m working my way through that list, and documenting what I’m calling my Gold Digging. You can’t access his list without a subscription to the LA Times, and the link changes every year to his newest list. There are, however, many consistencies from year to year. Here’s a map I made of his 2016 list, which is the one I’m currently working off of.
Guessipes
My passion (some might say obsession) with food is most definitely inherited from my family. Family gatherings always centered around food, especially my grandma’s amazing Chinese home cooking. Unfortunately for me, her cooking seemed to be driven by instinct and muscle memory, rather than any kind of training, science, or even basic measurements. Getting anything resembling a recipe out of her was pretty much impossible, as she would vaguely outline a list of ingredients, never detailing specific quantities. My inevitable follow-up question of “how much” would be met with answers like “enough”. And when I asked how I was supposed to know how much was “enough”, she would say things like “you smell it”.
This ill-defined methodology appears to have been passed down, as the rest of my family seems equally unable to clearly detail ingredients, quantities, and instructions – the three key components of a recipe. After my grandma passed, I realized that we’d already lost many family recipes that lived nowhere but in her. So I decided I should start making a record before more were lost and as new ones were invented. My gift to future generations! It turned out, though, that I’d also inherited this less than scientific way of cooking, tending often to pour without measuring, mix and match ingredients, and simplify or substitute at will if I did happen to be starting from some kind of recipe. So I’m doing my best to be more specific, but also leave room for improvisation, as I write up what my cousin appropriately calls Guessipes.