Food Memories and Musings

     I am watching Julie and Julia tonight, and am loving every moment.  As an adult who grew up with beautiful food and discovery, I appreciate the creation and and consumption of fabulous food.  I'm getting hungry watching!  But more importantly, I'm noticing how far I've fallen away from my former ways of cooking and experimenting.  Work has taken much of my interest and energy elsewhere, but I'm convinced I must try at least once a week to make something beautiful.  I need to feel I'm creating something of quality to put into my body.  On the other hand, I know that whatever I do in the kitchen will be mine entirely to do, and sometimes it seems less like creating and more like work.  Do I really have the time? 
     My father was a foodie, and he and I experimented with all types of vegetarian fare, desserts, and breads when I was in high school and lived at home.  I rarely ate meat, and spent a few years sugar/white flour free in my teen years.  Lots of creative brown rice, a gorgeous broccoli/tofu/cashew dish served over greens with a homemade dill cream dressing...   sigh.... I feel so sentimental about it. 
     My father was a pastry chef, a restaurant man for life.  Such a difficult and sometimes heartbreaking industry.  Hopes and dreams wrapped up in little pastries and hot cups of black coffee ;)  We had a bakery when I was young, lines out the door in the morning waiting for our freshly baked bread.  When the grocery stores began offering in-store bakeries, we were done.  Closed doors, moving on.  But dad and I bonded over little cafes, McMenamin's in Portland, OR, mom and pop restaurants like The Otis Cafe on the shady, winding road to the Oregon Coast, with their breads and delicious crumbly pies.  He's gone now, passed away from cancer a few years ago.  I used to have a roommate who was an adventurous foodie, Amy, who explored Ethiopian, French, and specialty beer with me.  But I've since moved, and I haven't found a foodie to fill in for Dad, or Amy, and I feel terribly lost in suburbia with awful bland food and no one to explore with me. 
     Where I live now, food discoveries are few and far between.  Horrible chain restaurants with their happy hours, sticky menus, and grilled chicken salads covered in awful dressings.  Give me a thick chunk of bread at Papa Hayden's with a slab of butter and a vegetarian sandwich with crispy onion strings inside.  Finish with some fabulous rich chocolate and a perfect little white ceramic cup of coffee.  I hope I dream about it tonight.  My food memories are so interwoven into my life.  I need to revisit the joy of creating something beautiful and giving myself a moment to enjoy it.  Rush, rush, rush, and before you know it I'm eating Progresso Light out of a pop-top can at lunch without heating it.  Yes, I really do that.  Shameful!

Love you Dad!  I miss our food outings so much...

     I began to cook meat only a few years ago, when I married my carnivorous husband :)  I was forced to feed him flesh!  Aargh!  He recalls my first chicken dish cooked in red wine.  Purple Chicken, he calls it.  My dear roommate Amy cooked it beautifully, but when I tried... it was indeed, purple.  But I've adjusted, and even eat seafood now.  I even COOK seafood!  I never thought the day would come. I've experienced gourmet meals at beautiful restaurants because my husband took me on dates, and have tried many adventurous foods I would never have been brave enough to consume before. (hello alligator chowder!)  So I owe to both my father and my husband many thanks for broadening my food horizons. 
     I hereby promise, to myself, to you, and to my husband, that I will dig out my huge collection of cookbooks and make an effort to reconnect to another part of myself I've lost the past few years.  No, I won't be going on a year-long food odyssey of 500+ recipes, but at the very least I can recreate a little bit of Portland in my own kitchen and make new foodie memories of my own. 
As Julia Child would say, of course, Bon Appetit!
XOXO
Andrea