The Start of Something New

This is the obligatory first post, because I feel strange about immediately writing about foods before an introduction of sorts. I suppose this will do for now.

Food not only brings me delicious instant gratification, but is also intertwined with my family history, happy memories, community building and friendship. I come from a family of very good cooks, although I didn't realize this when I was younger and only gradually recognized this as I grew older and left for college. We've got three generations under the same roof, three generations worth of stories, experiences, and recipes. But since we're Chinese, we don't write anything down. That's something that Americans invented. So, I grew up watching my family cooking, picking up certain tricks of the trade and time-honored "recipes" not through scraps of paper, but through watching and, sometimes, participating.

Making wontons and jiaozi dumplings out of scratch was a monthly occurrence. On her days off, my mom would knead dough and mix up a batch of meat and vegetable filling as I would watch from the sidelines. My dad can also whip up a mean meal as good as any amateur chef. It's amusing watching him get a kick out of baking cakes and making green onion rolls; he never lets anyone else "help" during the cooking process, fearing a less competent soul will ruin his creation. So, long story short, everyone in my family cooks, and I grew up learning that to be a competent person, I had to 1) learn how to cook, and 2) enjoy eating.

Holidays were another story, occasions during which both my immediate and extended family unleashed their culinary skills. That's another reason why I like food. Just like certain songs or objects are evocative of memories or childhood, food is so evocative of the best times of my life. Think about it. The celebrations and holidays you shared with family; the lunches shared with friends during school while sitting on the bench; the midnight runs to greasy spoon joints to cure those munchies; the dates you've shared with your loves; the picnics, barbecues, cookouts, bonfires, oh how I could go on forever! Think back to your happiest moments with family and friends, and I'm sure many of those memories are characterized by a common thread: the sharing of food.

This obsession with food started when I discovered the Food Network in the summer before my junior year of high school, and I started thinking about food not as just something to eat, but as a philosophy of life. Over the last few years, I've very often talked about food, sporadically wrote about food, occasionally taken pictures of foods, but this is the first time I've decided to do something more with food. As I'm leaving a familiar chapter of my life--the schooling phase--and embarking on the next, unknown chapter, I've been told repeatedly to be proactive in life, to take risks and actually start doing new things. This is a move in the direction of starting new things. I've wanted to write about food for a long time, and it's about time I start this--and having just finished college and with all this new free time, I think it's the best time to start.

So... I like food, and I like writing, and this is my way of sharing my love with you.

Cheers!