OK, enough about us...
let's talk about them
You will only cook as well as you eat. This might seem a slightly arguable assertion, but be assured, it's one of those overlooked, simple rules of living. You can spend all your life in the kitchen, but until you taste the fare of a superior chef, you'll never climb that extra stair toward greatness. Obviously, this applies in almost every aspect of life: a runner may never break his own record until losing a race, a painter may be reborn after glimpsing his first Picasso, a writer may forever cower before the words of Hemingway. There are electrifying are moments, throughout your life, when you come face-to-face with a greatness you will never achieve. These are fantastic opportunities, for they decide your character, your road, your fate. These are the moments you either blindly stretch your personal limits, or you throw in the towel, the paint-brush, or the pen, and leave the masterpieces to the masters.
Fortunately, we're not here to talk about writers and artists and their endless inferiority complexes. We're not even here to talk about expert chefs and their superiority issues. We are here to talk about food, and eating, and meals. Luckily, an unforgettable meal is constructed of a thousand contextual details that transcend the cook and even the food itself. There are the wafting smells, the consuming company, the whispering memory, the quality of light, the wood of the chair, the crisp of the napkin, the stain on the shirt. A thousand particulars slip between our taste buds, then hover and hang in our memory.
Through these culinary adventures, we grow in to the cooks we are. We may sometimes grovel at the feet of skilled professional chefs, though only in the name of personal growth. We are here to share our culinary adventures, outside our own homes, whether we are thrilled, aghast, amazed or under- whelmed by an eating experience. We are here to review restaurants, critique friends, and applaud mothers. We're here to talk about the cooks THEY are, what they've done to us, what we've learned, what we've stolen, and what we all have to bring to the table.
