Experiments

When I first tried out cooking at 10 years old, I didn’t understand what all the hype was about. Follow some steps and the food comes out as you’d expect it. If it came out any different, then it most likely means you did something wrong. This was about all I could think about as my aunt showed me the ropes by cooking some family recipes. So after a few weeks, I got bored and stopped cooking.

Fast forward a few years and a couple Travel channel shows later, I was beginning to see food in a different light. I saw culture, creativity, and craft in all the culinary works being showcased on these television shows. So, once again, I cooked. But this time it was different. My sister had brought up the idea of cooking a whole meal. But this was no normal family meal. She had gotten the idea to cook a red wine chicken with potatoes au gratin. A meal in which I would cook the potatoes and she would cook the chicken. Not only was this something we’d never had or done before, it was completely different from all our family recipes. This meant I was starting from a blank slate. I had a recipe, but no concept of what it could or should turn out to be. The process remained largely the same, but the little details started to change. Between figuring out what I had available, what I found necessary, and the techniques I had from what my family’s knowledge was limited to, there was puzzle to be solved. Cooking wasn’t about following a recipe at that point. It was about solving that puzzle to bring to life the image of what the dish I wanted to create was. The shows had given me a window of the creativity of food from all around the world, and then the experience of making something from a lack thereof gave me the realization that there was nothing stopping me from doing the same.

At this point you are probably thinking that I began cooking all the time and it became an amazing life long hobby from then on. In reality though, this dish became the only thing I cooked once every few months. After all, I was only around 16 at the time and cooking for the family sounded like a chore that got in the way of TV and video games because it would be. But it did start the groundwork for what was to come as I would later recall this experience during college. By then I had to do my own groceries, make my own food, and eat out at many establishments where I was disappointed by the lack of creativity (I remember the first time someone told me about a sushirrito and my excitement turned into disappointment when it turned out it was just a marketing ploy for a slightly larger uncut sushi roll). All this meant I ended up cooking what I wanted to eat and enjoyed blindly trying to get to what that was.

Now, after all these years, aspiring to satisfy my desires and creativity through cooking has served as a fun hobby. I learn from what I see and hear, but I have no regard for keeping convention for convention’s sake. I do what I want to do because it sounds like a good idea and, if it happens to turn out well, I share it with the people around me. All this has led to periods of experimentation with ingredients that you see here with those learnings later utilized in coursed meals I would create.