How Did I Get Here?
Growing up on the edge of Maryland’s horse country was the best of all worlds — the comfort of suburbia with quick access to the city, the beauty and lessons taught in the early morning light of a farm, and the ability of being at the ocean in three hours, the mountains in two, and our nation’s capital in one. Everything was within reach and everything was available. And, yet, when I look back, it is the trips taken with my family, the food adventures of my father, and the lessons learned in the kitchen that made the most imprint on my life.
The best places for me to be were always away from home. Reflecting now, the reason is obvious; the apartment I grew up in was also the place where, at the age of three, I last saw my birth mother alive. In a single moment the gravitational forces that normally tether one to a certain location exploded and reversed, propelling rather than pulling, and pushed my horizons to envelop the world instead of remaining near the place where I grew up.
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As a child, this manifested itself in my desire to explore the stream behind our apartment, its boundaries expanding as I grew in age, until in my teens when I had covered the entirety of accessible water. From the culvert it came out of at one end to the larger stream it fed at the other. The minnows, crawfish, and birds were my friends. The snapping turtles, litter, and snakes were my enemies. And both had lessons to teach.
I mostly remember the trips. The vacations and excursions with my father and my second mother, the women who adopted me so that she wouldn’t be less than an equal partner in my upbringing. The missions to taste again a meal at a certain restaurant to deduce the recipe of a dish my father had enjoyed while on the road, to find a specific sausage only made in Lumberton North Carolina, or to track down the perfect Smithfield ham to be used in a ham biscuit recipe. It was those trips that implanted the seeds of travel, the desire to meet people from other cultures, and gave me the vocabulary in the universal language of preparing a meal.
My father was a complicated and difficult man who was, like most, deeply flawed. But he imparted a love affair with food, travel, and cooking that continues to this day. Food and travel; one nourishes the body, the other the soul.
The centrality of where I grew up, and the adventures undertaken forged within me the passion of exploration and desire to express those treasures discovered, whether those be tastes, experiences, or ideas expressed as words, photos, or meals. Those years in Maryland made me curious and cultivated what would become the most beautiful affliction of incurable wanderlust. I hope you enjoy reading these posts as much as I enjoyed the journey that allowed me to write them.
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