Where I Come From

I was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the heart of the slow food movement. I have always loved food. From an early age, I was spending time in the kitchen, insanely curious about everything (and getting a reputation as a troublemaker). I have always loved to try new foods and learn about new cooking techniques and recipes. My parents were both students of the University of California, Berkeley, and I spent the early part of my life living in the married student housing, surrounded by people from many different backgrounds and cultures. I have vivid memories of tea with our neighbors from Ireland, Iranian rice pilaf, and eating sheets of seaweed and shrimp crackers with my Korean friends. Growing up with friends from all over the world, I was able to learn and grow into many cultures at once. This has influenced my entire life.

We ate at home most nights at my house growing up, and both of my parents cooked. My father had spent much of his young life as a chef and his love of food and of cooking food himself, with his own hands, showed me what one could do with love for and knowledge of ingredients.

When I was older, my family moved to a small (very small) town on the coast north of San Francisco. My younger brother and I spent our days running over the beaches and exploring the forests around our house. We ate wonderful local cheese and milk, and I discovered oysters, which remain one of my favorite foods today. Our next door neighbor had, briefly, a business farming abalone, and we used to be the recipients of 5-gallon buckets of the hugely expensive mollusks (which of course we didn't realize at the time). There was always frozen abalone in our house.

After that, I spent a lot of time in restaurants and catering businesses and voraciously tearing apart every book on food or cooking I could get my hands on. I am a student of cultural anthropology these days as well as an avid home chef. Now, years later, I live, with my husband in Tucson, Arizona. Abalone is not common fair in our house these days, but the love for delicious local, ethnic, and handmade food endures.


copyright 2010 the creeping unknown