Who are we?
We are a husband (Tom) and wife (Shells) who forged a relationship around a love of cooking (his), a love of baking (hers), and a love of wine and eating (theirs). Both of us work in corporate jobs that we love; however, they are demanding jobs ... which brings me to the next point ...
Why are we doing this?
We love to do many things, but chief among them (besides work of course) are cooking and traveling to eat. Cooking & eating provides a bit of release from the corporate worlds we spend our days in and we think we've gotten kinda good at it ... leading to point 3 ...
What gives us the authority to write this?
We'll be honest, not much. Tom trained in restaurant kitchens during his formative years (ok, that's a glamourous way to say he worked in kitchens for a few years in college). Shells has been baking & doing all things dough since her early childhood, starting with simple things (cupcakes and cookies) before graduating to the big leagues with pasta, dumplings & any dessert that Bon Appetit can put on the cover.
We both studied (that's code for drinking) wine at the feet of some awesome sommeliers who specialize in old world wine (and who now work for one of the most awesome wine importers in the US). They taught us how to appreciate old wine and new wine, from old world and new world. Once, one of them even tried to convince us that orange wine was awesome, jury's still out.
We started eating at young ages, almost immediately actually, and quickly progressed from the days of apple sauce and mushed peas. Shell's childhood culinary development consisted largely of oyster crackers, horseradish & raw clams ... and this was just age 6. In her teenage years Shell's enjoyed numerous perfectly grilled (medium rare) steaks and baked potatoes perfected by her parents, swimming fish were not an option in her household, only the kind that have shells (no pun intended). While in college Shell's red meat access decreased and in turn limited her culinary spark. Meeting Tom reintroduced the meats and fish she avoided for so long (except Salmon that is still off the table). Tom learned to eat a bit of everything from his mother, who has had a subscription to Bon Appetit for as long as he can remember ... well, everything except Mole sauce. After college, and his kitchen experiences, Tom got the opportunity to start traveling for work ... 6 years with extended stays both domestically and abroad gave him the opportunity to eat all over the place, and all types of food, (but I'm jumping ahead a little bit here).
Two years into Tom's traveling, we started dating and the love affair with food grew quickly from there. We started with a tasting menu together in Prague ... tasting menus together on 3 other continents ... a few times with Tom cheating on Shells (while traveling with friends) ... and a time or two with Shells cheating on Tom (while traveling herself).
So here we are now ... more fun food travel, cooking and eating ahead of us ...
So what's the point of this blog?
Like so many other blogs, we're going to continue to travel and post pictures of the awesome restaurants we eat in. We'll probably have some big blowout dinners that take way too much time to prepare and you, our reader, won't want to make them. But please, hang with us through those, so that we can get to the real meat and potatoes of this blog ...
We're going to take pictures and post recipes of the fun stuff that we cook on week nights after we come home for work ... it won't all be crazy or complicated ... and some things will seem that way at first, but we promise they won't be. Please feel free to ask questions, we'll answer as we can ... but just work with us if Tom's answer is: some, a lot, a good sized bowl worth of ... Shells is good at the measuring stuff ... why not join us for the ride?
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