Food 101

 I'll never forget the first time I saw a raw egg on a pizza. 

That wasn't even the most horrifying thing on it. No, my seafood pizza, "fruits de mer," had tentacles and prawns with eyes. I am not sure why I even ordered a seafood pizza, as we had nothing like that back in Ohio, USA, and Ohio does have good pizza. But I was in a small town in Luxembourg, which to a twenty year old Ohioan was exotic, and I wanted to try new things.

The pizza place was called San Marino. My housemates and I went there with our host family in the beginning of our junior year in Luxembourg, the first of many times we would eat a San Marino pizza. Us Miami students must have quadrupled their business that year, the first year the school was located in the town of Differdange. We ate so much pizza from there they created a carryout service just for us. 

Pizza was a good starting point for food exploration. In the Midwest, food was, er, rather unadventurous. An average Midwestern cupboard contained salt, black pepper, cinnamon, something generic called "Italian seasoning," maybe a lemon pepper mix, and a handful of stale spices used once in a new recipe that had most likely not been cooked again. Midwesterners put crumbled potato chips on top of casseroles made with cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, and cheese again, often with canned cream of mushroom soup, and called it cooking. The internet has improved Midwestern fare a great deal, but do a Pinterest search for "casserole" and you will see that they are still massacring tastebuds in droves. My mother did better than most. We always had vegetables and I am grateful for that. She also had spices.

Europe was my first exposure to a different kind of food, however. Suburban southwest Ohio in the eighties had Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, but these were blanded up for the American palate. I was exposed to real Italian food early on in that year in Europe - in actual Italy - and a particular meal in Cinque Terre where I tasted pesto for the first time (in September during real pesto season in the area where pesto was invented) showed me all that food could be. To this day it is still one of the best meals I have ever eaten.

I learned that fresh food is the way food is meant to be eaten. I learned that produce shouldn't be as expensive as it is in the US. I learned that frozen meat is a crime against nature. And I learned to respect cheese as a divine gift and not something to smother casseroles with. 

It would be some years before I would cook on my own. I learned about Arab food while studying Arabic in Monterey, CA, but I only ate it, never cooked it. A friend of mine I met there and with whom I lived when I moved to DC taught me about Indian spices. I had never heard of such wonders as cardamom, turmeric, garam masala, corriander, and fenugreek. Still I did not cook.

Then I moved to a house with him and started a garden. It was a small Italian herb garden with a couple of tomato plants, though I struggle to remember exactly what I grew. I know basil and oregano were involved. That's when I started to cook. I had to learn the basics. I had never cooked fresh broccoli. I didn't know how long chicken should cook. I didn't know what a dry rub was. I couldn't identify ginger in a grocery store. Stir fries and soups were easy enough. I made my first Thanksgiving dinner there, and the turkey turned out perfectly. I made my first homemade tomato sauce, too. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to be working. I discovered I had a knack for flavors.

Then came a series of life upheavals - a mouse problem in the house after the pipes froze and exploded, depression, being passed over for a promotion, going to Eastern Europe for three months, unemployment, the Obama campaign, more unemployment. Then I got a job with a Lebanese organization, which changed everything. Living in Beirut exposed me to the best food on the planet and a people who appreciate it. Here is where I would learn that food is a lifestyle, an art, a spiritual conquest.

I grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs at my next place. I began to collect spices. My life was still in upheaval, as in only three years I went through three jobs, a lot of it due to the Bush recession and budget cuts. The house became a nightmare of pestilence of all kinds, including bedbugs, mice, and a slumlord who stole my tomatoes and peppers. But after all that, a miracle. A recruiter called me out of the blue, and six years later, I am still with the company and am living in a place with enough space for a decent sized garden, where I grow a dozen herbs, tomatoes, peppers, all kinds of greens, potatoes, strawberries, carrots, melons, cucumbers, and whatever else I can fit into the plot. Gardening is the bulk of my free time. I am motivated to provide something nice for my neighbors to look at while also cooking food that I grow myself. The fulfillment you get when eating something you have grown is fantastic.

I have a whole kitchen wall of spices these days and create my own recipes, but I am still learning to cook. Once you stop learning, you probably start making casseroles filled with dairy fats and cans of creamed salt. I'm still trying to get timing down. I still can't poach an egg. My obsession is flavors and the weirder it sounds, the more it is a challenge I want to tackle. I make excellent chili but recently I thought, what if chili, except with shrimp, and what if you cook the chili with the juice of a whole lime, and it was delicious. I put cayenne in fruity drinks and sauces because the universe made them go together. I grind my own spice mixtures in my "kitchen lab" and name them political things like "Rosemary's Babygate" and "Ruth Bader Ginger" because I live and grow things on Capitol Hill. I buy most produce from the local farmers market and use the local butcher and fishmonger when I can. I never follow the recipe if I am using one and I try new and weird things as a rule. 

Still, I would never put a raw egg on pizza.