Dave's introduction
Hello, my name is dave and I am a food addict. I love cooking, eating, growing, reading about and playing with food.
I'm not much of a food snob, mostly I like fairly simple dishes. What I am a snob about is quality and variety of ingredients. I can't imagine why anyone buys eggs from caged hens after trying fresh eggs from pastured hens. And the quality of most supermarket vegetables are atrocious. The only time I buy any of them is during the winter when there's nothing in the garden and the farmer's market is closed.
My mom started us cooking when we were about 4 years old. She had us mixing the cookie dough and putting it on the cookie sheets. We also got to make our own sandwiches and hotdogs. As time went on, I started advancing to all the kid foods that I liked.
Towards the end of third grade, my older brother and I were complaining about something my mom made for dinner, and she told us to either eat what was in front of us or start making our own meals. My brother shut up, and I headed to the kitchen. Within a year, I was making about half my own dinners, and a couple of times a week I was cooking for the entire family.
I love trying to cook all sorts of ethnic foods, and learning how to make them true to the culture, but then I feel no qualms about modifying them to my own tastes. That way I learn about the ingredients from that other culture and what their food is supposed to taste like, instead of the totally Americanized versions that some cookbooks give us. If the Thai cookbook is full of references to soy sauce, with hardly a mention of fish sauce, it's time to pass it by.
I also have an aversion to recipes that include cans of cream of whatever soup. While I have eaten a couple of dishes where it really was the right flavor, it's mostly just a lousy excuse for a white sauce.