Although I think my posts do reveal quite a bit about myself, I’ve been feeling that I didn’t tell the entire story when I introduced myself before. I have experimented with food as long as I have been cooking it, and that urge itself was just an extension of a drive that I’ve had my whole life: to create, and to take things apart.

I was the kid who would take apart all his toys, and then put them back together again. Usually some parts would be left over but somehow the toy still worked. This happened to everything from action figures to alarm clocks. I got my first Nintendo for Christmas of 1986, and by ‘87 (age 10) I had taken mine apart more than once, and was actually fixing Nintendo for other kids in the neighborhood.

My favorite toy of all, though, were Lego’s. Putting together AND taking apart! I doesn’t get any better than that!

Fast forwarding a couple of years, my parents run their own business. As you can imagine this sometimes led to long working hours for them. I would get home from school around 3:30pm or so, and they would usually not get home from work until after 5 or later. Owing to my insatiable appetite, and the lack of convenient snacks in the house, this led me to start cooking.

The first dish that I have memory of cooking for myself is Ramen Noodles. I liked them a lot and my parents knew that if I ate 5 of them they were only going to be out fifty cents or so. I would cook my self one (or two) when I got home from school before my parents came home. Once I had tried all the flavors the store had though, my urge to tinker started to take over. Having no kind of direction or instruction at all, I started raiding my mothers spice cabinet and experimenting with the flavors. Some times they ruined the dish, in which case I was only out a few pennies anyway, but other times they improved it quite a bit. Then I started branching out to raiding the leftovers in the fridge, and before long I had created my very first recipe. I believe it still exists on an index card in my mother’s recipe collection somewhere. The recipe was for Curry Cabbage Soup. You cook one chicken flavored Ramen per package directions, and add to the broth chopped cabbage, chopped cooked chicken, and curry powder. And you know what? I still think that’s a good soup!

Fast forwarding even more years, we come to my late high school era. Ben and I, having known each other our whole lives, were now living under the same roof (a story in itself, but one that belongs in another post, on another blog) and starting to experiment with food together. We were kindred spirits where that was concerned. In those days the primary focus of our experiments were breakfast cereals, sandwiches, and ice cream.

Cereal, especially Cheerios, would usually end up with peanut butter in them (and if the adults weren’t looking, some chocolate syrup), along with several other experiments over time. Ice cream got mixed with just about everything that wasn’t bolted down. The adults would wisely buy cheap ice cream because we went through it so fast, it was one gallon buckets of vanilla. Being that as plain as it is, we found ways to…improve (?) it.

But my personal favorite thing to experiment with in those days was sandwiches. They were massive affairs, involving several layers of bread and just about everything that could be found in the fridge. Ben’s mother (bless her kind heart, I have no idea how she put up with us) at first would see what we were doing and say “you can put whatever you want on it, but you HAVE to eat it”, thinking that would eventually be enough to discourage us. When that completely failed to moderate our consumptions (since we had no trouble at all eating our freakish sandwiches) she had to start putting more restrictions on us, simply on grounds of the cost of toppings we were consuming.

Ben and I parted ways for a couple of years after high school, and my experimenting continued. I spent a couple of years in California living with very little income with a series of roommates who were in similar situations. I found even more ways to cook Ramen. My favorite now is probably fried. I would microwave the noodles in water until it had softened but was not yet cooked, and then I would take it out and finish it in a frying pan, sprinkling on some of the flavor packet when it was finished. That makes a great side dish.

But the main thing that came from this era is potatoes. They are cheap, filling, and tasty. I learned all kinds of ways to cook them, but especially fell in love with frying them. I would make a “breakfast hash” for my roommates consisting of a skillet filled with fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, onions, and bacon or sausage. They would beg me to make it.

A few years later I was married and starting to raise a family. This is when I discovered grilling. I got my first gas grill and started grilling everything in sight.

So we come to today. I’ll let Ben speak for himself, but I think he has taken a very similar path as I have, culinarily speaking, and though we live in different cities now we’ve always kept in touch enough to swap food discoveries and talk about the latest thing we are cooking.

In the last year, I FINALLY convinced Ben to start using an instant messaging program, and our food discussions became nearly daily. We will discuss whatever food win we had the night before, and talk about the fail that is our cafeteria food at work. It was only a matter of time before this blog came about.

So there you have it, my complete food story. More than you ever wanted to hear, I’m sure. So I’ll just sum up by saying that experimenting with chefery is not just a hobby for me, it’s how I’ve lived most of my life. I find that it fills a deep urge to create that I find in myself, and I hope that this blog will not only let me share some of my creations with other people, but will alow me to capture it so that I can better reflect on it later, and not forget my own lessons.