Shall we begin?
Welcome to the soft opening of L&O. No pictures, no recipes, just some thoughts about food and probably a little too much information about how I come to be typing this entry. Not very sexy, but neither Rome nor SmittenKitchen were built in a day.
When I was an eighth grader at R.J. Grey Junior High, I won the home ec award. And was mortified.
Loving food, and being good at its preparation, was downright embarrassing to my 13-year-old American female self. Food was the path to fat, and being fat was to be avoided at all costs. Plus, food was domestic and bodily, not worldly and intellectual, as I sought to be. As I continued to grow and mature, my conflicted relationship with food continued to be…conflicted. I hosted multi-course dinner parties as a teenager, with pretty sophisticated food, and took great pride in my cooking skills. But at the same time, I was reticent to really commit; I didn’t really like to talk food with people, and I often claimed not to eat what I cooked. Which was a lie.
Off I went to college, where I found myself making (bad) homemade bread and staying in to watch the newly-hatched Food Network. Emeril, on that black-and-white studio kitchen with a half-moon over his shoulder, already irritating me with his bizzarre malapropisms, but opening my mind to cooking with pork fat and love. Caprial’s Kitchen, on PBS, I believe, through which Caprial Pence vastly improved my knife skills and introduced me to pacific northwest cuisine. But still, food remained a guilty pleasure, not something to talk about in polite company, and certainly not with boys. I was that girl, ordering a salad on a first date.
I indulged in a blissfully misspent early twenties, bouncing from coast to coast, and spending my meager food pennies on the ingredients for curried lentil soup and pasta puttanesca rather than ramen. Learning about the warmth of bringing friends together for a homecooked meal. I absolutely realized that food was my calling, yet I vacillated, resisting the call. I applied to professional cooking school programs then talked myself out of enrolling, worried that life in a kitchen would expose my unseemly food obsession. As if I were still fooling anyone at all.
Next came a safe move, to law school, followed by a half-decade of keeping the same nights-and-weekends hours as a chef. The pay was better, but the passion wasn’t there. And then came kids. And cancer. And realization that a life without passion is not much of a life at all.
And as I traveled my own path, our culture was undergoing its own food evolution. After eating to live for so long, having reduced meal prep to grab-nuke-eat for almost two generations, America began living to eat. Led by Saint Alice and her merry band of California cuisine pioneers in the 70’s, and egged on by Food Network, by food bloggers, by the rise in artisanally-produced everything, the rebirth of farmer’s markets…food is cool, now. Lucky me! Just as I am steeling myself to reject what I perceived as a culturally constructed bias against food as the subject of discourse, food becomes the subject of discourse. And I can just hop on the bandwagon.
So here we are. Love & Onions is the on-line hub for this next chapter in my life, in which I cook and write and blog and teach and proudly feed the people I love. Pull up a chair, please, and grab a fork.
Navel Gazing | jen | 
January 18, 2010 12:30 pm
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By Kae, February 8, 2010 @ 9:41 pm
Nice navel. A truly funny (and honest!!) opening. Can’t wait for all that is to come. xo
By Francois, February 22, 2010 @ 11:17 am
Jen,
I’ve missed you! I look forward to taking a class or two in the Spring. I’ve learned so many long lasting lessons from you. You’re such a great teacher!
By jen, March 8, 2010 @ 2:51 pm
Hey Francois! Great to hear from you! Let’s definitely try to get together this spring, for a lesson or just a chat; I’d love to catch up.–J