I Spent Years in a Relationship with Food, But All I Got Was This Blog

It's funny how sometimes the Stream of Consciousness can actually lead somewhere. Mine seems to have landed me in Portland, Oregon.

People always ask me why I up and moved to Portland, pretty much out of the blue, after having spent most of my life bouncing around the right side of the country between Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Washington, DC.

"Well, the food, of course!"

This is what I tell them, but it's usually not deemed a satisfactory answer, so I have to rephrase it a bit. I moved here because I love the quality of life Portland offers. I love the beauty that surrounds the place--the city, the mountains, the people. I feel right. I "fit." (And I don't fit anywhere.) And for me, Happiness is largely found amidst the stacked rainbow tables of the local farmers market, or swirling through a tulip-lipped carafe of Willakenzie Estate Terres Basses Pinot Noir, or in my own humble kitchen stocked with local bounty.

Portland is a food town at it's best--creative yet classic, indulgent yet modest, and fabulously positioned in the middle of a palatable wonderland. (Think Willy Wonka's edible room, but replace the gum drop trees with filbert trees and succulent marionberry bushes, swap the marshmallow mushrooms with golden chanterelles and shitakes, and drain the chocolate river and refill it with hop-heavy microbrews, organic house-roasted coffee, and earthy, inspiring wines the leave the French shaking in their chaussures.)

My first (and only) trip to Stumptown prior to my hasty move was in mid-September, and I had a day to kill with a local chef friend who gave me a tour of the kitchen before we hit the streets of downtown. It was a Wednesday, as luck would have it, and we stumbled upon the Park Blocks Farmers Market. There, we sampled fragrant herbed cheeses, sipped organic Hood River cider, and left with a crusty multi-grain baguette and the world's most luscious white peaches at their juicy, flavorful peak. It was all over for me right there.

I'm not exactly sure where my affair with Food started--maybe somewhere circa 1986 when I was pulling spices and dried beans from the cabinets, mixing them all in a bowl, and then patiently waiting for my terrified cats to indulge in the treat I created for them. Maybe it was in 8th grade home ec, the true manifestation of my middle school awkward phase (sure, we'll call it a phase), where I secretly reveled in that hour of grilled cheese-making bliss and didn't mind staying after class. (Alright, I'll give it another shot. I'll give home ec another shot...) Or maybe it's just that I'm always hungry. Needless to say, we dated briefly, Food and I, and then I, being the codependent one, dove head first into a serious relationship. Now one of us just has to commit. Culinary school? Restaurateur? Assistant line cook, at least? Nope.

Always the difficult one, I didn't think taking this infatuation and putting it to logical use was the right path for me. My professional life has nothing to do with the culinary world at all, but I still get at it in any way I can on the side, changing our relationship from healthy coexistence to something more like addiction. And now that I'm in Portland, all bets are off. So, since rehab is clearly not an option, (you wouldn't drop a recovering alcoholic in the middle of Oktoberfest and expect her to stay on the wagon, would you?) my fetish needs some sort of outlet while the farmers markets are out of season. This brings me to the blog. My first blog! Well, what else would I write about? Coworker woes and shamefully contrived soul-searching? I know what you're thinking, but don't worry...I'll save that melodrama for my journal try to focus my public musings on adventures in gastronomy.

No, I don't have "credentials," but I like to think of my experiences as the Culinary School of Hard Knocks. Oh, you learned to make a perfect Béchamel in Sauces, 101? Well, I was spiking Prego with basil stolen from the neighbor's yard and my parents' cooking wine. I mashed potatoes for an entire Thanksgiving feast for 20 with nothing but a plastic fork! OK, enough already. (My tuiles could beat yours in a fight!)

I've never had a blog before, so I can't say exactly how successful I'll be at keeping up with it, or really how it's supposed to work at all. I find it slightly self-indulgent to put my inner monologue into writing and expect people to care about it, but hey, I love to write, and I can't really help it. (Addict, remember?) Let's say, in theory, I'll try to write about my food adventures, indulgences, feats and failures, and hope that at the least it comes out in a mildly entertaining way. Anyone who decides to read this, I hope you know that you are just feeding my addiction, so thanks a lot. (Enablers.)

Disclaimer: while this is a serious attempt at offering some actual food insight through my twisted affair with the culinary world, it is also just that; a glimpse at a personal relationship, which always brings with it an element of incoherency, emotional bias, and depending on the strength of the Stream of Consciousness, some unexpected debris.

Cheers!