Monday, March 24, 2025

This is the sixth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

What to write about this week? How about my old mainstay, food? Rather than just a completely random collection of musings every day, I thought it might be better to try to collect the posts each week around a central theme. That makes it a little easier on me to write, and on you to have something to look forward to. So without further ado, let's get to the grub!

Food and cooking have always had a very special place in my life. I grew up watching cooking shows, at first the traditional instructive programs with Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse, which were fun and cozy, but that all changed when I discovered the original Iron Chef Japan. I was enthralled by the pageantry, the drama, and the decorum that surrounded Kitchen Stadium. Rival factions of chefs, drama among the guest tasters, it was all fantastic. Despite learning later on that it was mostly all for TV, it was still foundational to my growing up, and its influence can be felt all through my later works. Watch it sometime, it’s a lot of fun.

I also watched a lot of the original Good Eats with Alton Brown, which taught me not only the methods and techniques of cooking, but also the science behind it. It also was one of the first cooking shows with what we would call worldbuilding today, with fictional side characters that would come in and out of each show, and while it didn’t have anything resembling a plot, it was still massively entertaining and rewarding for those who watched it regularly. When facing a hard problem, I’ll remind my wife that we need help by stating that I am not, in fact, a nutritional anthropologist.

All of this cooking fun convinced me that I wanted to be a professional chef for quite a while, until my wise grandfather, who managed a restaurant for many years, suggested that I wasn't suited for the high-pressure environment. Instead, I just liked cooking. So, I continued to do so, making use of the aptly-named copy of How to Cook Everything that my grandfather gave me. To me, cooking is one of the most fun forms of art, since you can take so many different ingredients and end up with so many different outcomes. Plus, you get to eat it afterwards! Thanks for reading, more tomorrow.

What are some of your favorite foods?