The Intrepid Appetite

You have to understand that I am not normally an adventurous eater. As a small child, I was taught to fear garlic. Salt, pepper, and rarely, a sliver of dried bay leaf floating in a watery stew were the seasonings that normally graced our family table.  It was not until my early 20s that I truly learned to enjoy food, to appreciate that it came in a variety of surprising tastes and textures.

So the appetite in this blog’s title is not mine. It belongs to my husband, a fearless consumer of nearly all things edible, and some that are not. He is also a consummate tinkerer around the kitchen, and a genuinely accomplished cook. For the seven years I’ve known him, he has been a vegetarian (or, more accurately, a pescatarian, that is, he eats fish and seafood, but nothing with fur or feathers. For him, it’s an ethical choice, and one that I respect but don’t share).  A retired pilot, he has never found a technical manual he couldn’t love, or a tool he could resist.  From a silky vichyssoise to a down-home mac and cheese, he is on a perpetual quest for the perfect recipe. He is my culinary hero.

With this blog I hope to share some of our adventures and discoveries with food, as well as the occasional recipe. We’ll fuel some lively discussion about the provenance and ethics of what we eat, and live and dine vicariously through the culinary journeys of others.  I’m not sure where we’ll go, what we’ll talk about, or who will be joining us. I am sure, however, that there is no end to the conversation.  Food is more than the stuff that sates our hunger, or the recipes that clutter up our bookshelves and hard drives. Food is social as well as cultural.  What we eat has political and economic implications.  Our choices are driven by ethics, aesthetics, and sometimes indifference.