Why Am I Doing This?

I suppose I should have kicked off this blog with an explanation, but that white chicken chili was the shit and I really wanted to post it, so... here you go. Better late than never.


The last couple years have been interesting to say the least. To kick it off, in 2014 my now-husband and I had separated after four years together which was devastating but thankfully brief. Then right as things were getting better, we were in a serious motorcycle accident that demolished my shoulder, required surgery, and a 2-month long absence from work. I couldn't move very well on my own and I was in a sling the whole time, so I survived on a diet of Easy Mac and Hot Pockets in the room my (now-)husband was renting which was conveniently right across the street from the hospital which I frequented in my state of disrepair. Right around the time I was feeling more or less recovered, we got married at the courthouse and shortly after, moved back in together - into an awesome studio in downtown Portland.


The new chapter begins.


I'm a hummingbird when it comes to hobbies – I get super-hyper-jazzed and throw myself headfirst into them – paper art, knitting, reupholstery, the list goes on. Then I move on to the next when I get bored which is astonishingly quickly. At the beginning of this new chapter, I was freshly due for a new hobby. I had been eating nothing but microwaved garbage for months and I felt crappy. How convenient that our studio was located directly above a Safeway. Cooking it is.


There is a website that I've followed obsessively for the last few years, Serious Eats. In particular, they have one contributor who is now a managing editor, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who writes passionately about not only food and cooking, but the science behind it. His writing and recipes are very fascinating and he finally published a cookbook last year, The Food Lab. My loving husband Jan had pre-ordered it for me and all 900+ pages arrived and changed my life. So there I was - with an amazing cookbook, a kitchen surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown Portland, and an elevator ride away from a grocery store. I would soon live in my kitchen.


I started working my way through the cookbook. First, I perfected all the elements of my absolute favorite dish on the planet Earth – Eggs Benedict. After like two dozen eggs that died sad deaths, I could poach like a mo-fo, and still can. I could probably poach a perfect egg while drunk and half-asleep, so I suppose the deaths of all of those eggs were not entirely in vain. Then I tackled Hollandaise sauce, which I had only ever previously prepared from a cheap packet of dust from the store. When I combined the two for the first time on top of toasted and buttered English muffins and grilled ham, it was better than any Benny I'd ever ordered from a restaurant. And I realized - after eating every bite - that I was not only satiated, but I felt... accomplished. For $10 worth of ingredients, I made two servings of restaurant-quality Eggs Benedict which would typically cost three times that much. Holy shit, I can do this. I can cook.


I find cooking to be incredibly therapeutic. During a time of transition in my life, standing in a kitchen full of amazing smells – THAT I TOTALLY MADE HAPPEN, YO – and then eating a delicious dish of food that I prepared is unexplainable. Everything involved in cooking helped heal me better than any surgery ever could – quietly mincing vegetables, searing meat, stirring eggs into cohesive perfection, bringing it all together... there's so much more to it than that, but every step of the way brings my anxiety down and my happiness up. It's like magic.


I now overlook a burgeoning garden and coop full of 6 happy hens while I cook in my kitchen, as opposed to the beautiful Portland downtown skyline I enjoyed last year. I tend to prefer the former, in all honesty – knowing that all of the plants I'm babysitting will one day end up on my plate is pretty satisfying.


So I suppose I will finally get to the point – why I'm doing this. Much like Julie & Julia – one of my favorite movies – I am going to cook every recipe and technique in The Food Lab. As a hobby hummingbird, I need something to keep me focused. That cookbook is just the thing.


I hope you'll join me on this journey as I make my way through 900 pages of cooking. We all need something or someone to keep us centered, because sometimes life feels like you're stuck in a centrifuge. I've found the one thing that centers me amidst all the chaos, much like a poached egg when it finally settles into a cohesive package at the bottom of the pan after flying around like a lunatic in the boiling water.


Let's do this. Bon appetit.