Intro?

So, I've decided to start blabbing somewhere about food. Currently, I talk to anyone who will listen about food. I love food. I was raised in a culture where food = family, gardening, celebration, relaxation, nutrition, treats, health, and a way to impress anyone who needs impressing.

Hence, I love it. My dad spent a large part of his life in Israel, and as a result, I think I grew up eating the "Mediterranean Diet" but I never cared enough to go read the book to verify the classification. Regardless, my family ate more salad than anyone else I know, and I was always the kid in school who ate the weird, ethnic, smelly sandwiches at lunch. Do you have any idea how hard it is to explain baba ganoujh and pita to bland WASPy kids, Americanized blacks, and jappy children of doctors and lawyers?

(The WASPs and jappy girls were THE WORST.)

Genetics and diet being what they are, I got skinny and tall, played basketball, and after enduring the nadir of my existence in middle school, my "cool" stock began to rise because I was definitely the first person of all my friends to not only know what hummus was, but to be able to make it myself. My parents did well, but they weren't wealthy, so salad and legumes somehow became my comfort foods. There's this little produce store down the street from my parents, M&M Farms. It is my opinion that everyone should have an M&M Farms. The store was patronized by Indian women in brilliant saris picking through cilantro, people of Caribbean origin negotiating through piles of bright fruit, workers of unidentifiable Hispanic descent deftly emptying boxes of apples onto already heaping piles, old Jewish couples buying a few bananas for the week, and me, often struggling to squeeze a cart with at least one wheel permanently stuck in the wrong direction through the weekend shoppers to keep up with my mom or dad and not lose my little brother. It was cool just to people-watch there, never mind the dirt cheap produce.

My mom can best be classified as a reformed hippy. She is a product of the Bronx, went to NYU to study art, and was one of the people dancing barefoot to international folk music in Washington Square Park back in the day. She evolved into a gardener extraordinaire, able to coax wild and very uncontrollable growth from flowers, fruits, and vegetables much to the delight of my brother and I. The flower beds routinely need to be beaten back so they don't take over the lawn, which is my mother's fervent wish despite my father's enjoyment of the presence of grass. I think my mom is using incrementalism cum manifest destiny; every year the flower beds gradually expand to accommodate new acquisitions. My dad is actually pretty tolerant of it. He complains, but I think it's just because he feels he ought to. So, my father went through the Israeli military as a medic. He was the kind of person who when everyone was sick of eating army food, he convinced someone to stand in for him while he went "fishing." This entailed tossing hand grenades into the Suez Canal and collecting the stunned fish while Egyptians were taking shots at anyone who showed themselves from the other side. Like I said, I grew up loving food, and I'm pretty sure nature and nurture played equally important roles.

Back to the gardening... seriously, you can't say you hate vegetables unless you've had them fresh-picked from a garden. You can practically taste broccoli arming you against cancer. Did you know broccoli can be spicy? Tomatoes are softer and squashy, but they have a fabulous flavor completely different from the wet pink styrofoam supermarket varieties. Cucumbers are cucumbery, you don't have to peel them, and zucchinis grow like mushrooms in the rain.

Occasionally, we'd have a bumper crop of something. One year, we had so much cilantro which self-seeds and grows like a weed, my mom sold armfuls to M&M Farms. Another year, we couldn't eat zucchini fast enough. We grilled strips marinated in soy and garlic, my dad sauteed it in tomato sauce and onions, steamed it with salt, pepper, and lemon, and my mom baked loaves and loaves of zucchini bread. I'm skipping over how much we gave away. This other time, it was cherry tomatoes. That was my favorite. Our variety of choice is Sweet 1 Millions. My mom would enlist my brother and me to pick them all, and we'd get bags and bags of them. Tomato salad (tomato, basil, garlic, lemon, salt, pepper), tomatoes in regular salad, grilled tomatoes on skewers, tomatoes as snacks... seriously, my brother ate so many he gave himself a stomach ache. But I couldn't blame him. Sun-warmed and fresh, they're the best. You stuff yourself.

As my bro and I got older, we went to college (he's still there), and we got to try those foods we were banned from as children. I'm not talking pizza or fried food or Chinese food; we ate all that. Dessert, too. We got a cookie in lunch, a piece of cake after dinner (but only after we had a fruit). It was just that those were things to be enjoyed in moderation. Truth of it is, I can taste sodium benzoate. I hate it. Kosher meat and poultry tastes better than nonkosher products. When bread falls apart as I spread peanut butter on it, it irritates me. I literally go to the supermarket and poke every brand. The least squashy loaf makes it into my basket.

So anyway, this is why I like food and where I'm coming from. Currently, I'm a grad student in biochemistry, trying to live on a below-minimum wage budget. My boyfriend (also a grad student) is a hell of a cook, and we eat really well given our age and current jobs. Ramen is an emergency-only food. :)

Truth is I don't know what I'll include here yet. Maybe recipe summaries when we make something of interest, in the style of Mark Bittman at the NY Times (check out his blog which is one of my favorite things to read). Maybe some rants on the state of food now. Who knows. I always have something to say.