There are 2 things you should know about me - I watch a lot of cooking shows (PBS, Food Network, Cooking Network), and I'm currently working on my master's degree in Training & Development, which is a semi-old-fashioned way of saying I study ways to help adults learn within organizations.
I've been taking a pair of classes lately about some fascinating and heady subjects, including how we all construct our own knowledge in very different ways, and how we have deep assumptions which drive the way we live our lives. All this is to tell you that I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I think, and how I learn.
I thought about making this blog about my general observations of how people learn, since noticing what people are doing was another theme of one of my classes, but ultimately I decided that this has probably been done already and better than I would do it. But, as I often am, I was inspired by making dinner.
Contrary to the ways I prefer to learn just about everything else (take a class, or just dive in head first with no prior learning at all), I take a middle road with my efforts to learn to cook. First, these came about entirely by accident many years ago when my mother and I, having only a few channels and finding nothing good on Saturday afternoons on TV, started watching PBS cooking shows, including Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Martin Yan, America's Test Kitchen, and the like.
After watching passively for several years, I discovered that my mother and I would start arguing about whether an episode was worth watching.
"Ew, it's about tomatoes and kim chee. We don't eat that. Let's watch a tape."
"Mom, we don't have to like it to watch and see what he does to make the food."
This went on over and over, until it dawned on me that we were watching very different shows: mom was watching to see food she could imagine eating, I was watching to absorb the techniques that the chefs were using, how the ingredients could be combined, and the patterns of what all the chefs were doing over and over again. In short, she was learning an occasional recipe, I was learning how to cook.
So, this blog is a long overdue outgrowth of that realization. I don't measure, don't write anything down, and consequently rarely make the same thing twice. While this is fun, it's also frustrating to others who might like to have something tasty I've made again.
The purpose of this blog will be two-fold:
- Document my recipes "for posterity."
- Reflect on how my food came to be what it is, what it tells me about how I learn, and maybe who I am
