I Love Food

I love everything about food. I love thinking about it, learning about it, shopping for it, wandering through grocery stores, ordering it, perusing menus, picking restaurants, prepping it, cooking it, tasting it, setting the table for a meal, plating it, eating it, sharing it… oh yeah, sharing it, that’s a favourite.

A lot of my early memories are food-related, making Play-Doh hamburgers and fries, building and re-building my Lego kitchen, playing restaurant with my sister. My Barbie house kitchen refrigerator and freezer was stocked with mini food and even had an ice cube tray with teeny-tiny ice cubes. Her dining room had a beautiful table and hutch with china, silverware, a silver coffee and tea set where the lid came off the sugar bowl… I have absolutely no recollection of Barbie’s bedroom or any other room. None.

Then there are the real-life childhood memories of food, stealing balls of cookie dough when my Mom wasn’t looking, my Dad insisting on making these horrible buckwheat pancakes when we were camping, my Grandmother coming over for dinner and her drinking the water from the steamed broccoli; she insisted that that was where the nutrients ended up (insert barf emoji here).

I remember helping my Mom in the kitchen all the time, from simple tasks to full assists with holiday meals. I remember grinding walnuts for cookies, dicing vegetables for antipasto, breaking down a chicken, setting the table with her wedding china and my grandmother’s sliver. I was making the family dinner by myself around the age of twelve; Mom got a part-time job at Eaton’s so I would come home to find instructions stuck to the hood fan and carry them out.

I remember the first food-related compliment my Dad ever ever gave me. Every year my Mom would go to Ottawa for two weeks to visit my other Grandmother. She would leave meals for us in the freezer but I would cook a lot too. One day a neighbour called, they brought a truckload of apples back from B.C. and would we like some? That night, after dinner, I served my Dad a slice of apple pie. He asked me if I had taken one of Mom’s pies out of the freezer, “nope, I made it this afternoon.” “Huh,” he said, “it taste’s just like your Mother’s.“

My first big fail happened the same way, Mom was away, I was cooking for Dad and I. I had picked up a recipe card from the grocery store, so this may have been the first time I wasn’t using one of my Mom’s recipes, I was going rogue. I remember it so clearly, it was Hasselback Potatoes. I followed the recipe to a tee and they were beautiful, cheesy, sliced with precision, but then we took a bite and immediately stopped chewing, “it tastes like grass,” my Dad said, while removing said bite from his mouth. This is how I learned the important difference between dried and fresh herbs.

I’ve been researching, learning about food, and how to cook it ever since.

Other Things I Love:

My family; Paul; our kids; I’m really close to my immediate family; my Mom and Dad; my sister and her fiancé; and their little princess of a pup, Sophie. I adore my mother-in-love, Cyndy; and Paul’s family, although we don’t see them nearly enough.

My friends. I have a group of friends I call “The Schoolgirls”, when my daughter asks who I’m going out with, we needed names to differentiate who was who. There are five of us in this group, three of us have known each other since kindergarten, then two more since high school. So we have over thirty and forty years of friendship. My second group of girlfriends are called “JKLM” because that is the first letter of each of our names, we realized this when we were shopping in a stationery store in Thailand… good times. I digress… We’ve all been friends since three of us worked together as event planners 12 years ago. That last girl, the “J”, is my sister, Jodi. We’ve been best friends forever.

That leads me right into my next love,… travel. I traveled around a bit, domestically, into the States, and once to Mexico, when I was a kid and a young adult, but I started traveling internationally in 2009, eleven years ago. So far I’ve visited 23 countries including France, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, Thailand, Italy (three times now!) and England (just last year). (My travels are documented ________ someday there will be a link. Working on it.)

I was born and raised and still live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I am and always will be completely and passionately in love with my hometown.

I also love… pretty things, reservations, ampersands, stories you can’t stop thinking about, shopping local, kisses on the forehead, movies, the smell of bookstores, pockets, game nights, photography, that quick absence of sound when you drive under a bridge when its raining, genuinely nice people that you already want to hug right after you’ve only just met them, lined paper, day dates, ellipses…

Things I Don’t Love

Dishes. Inconsiderate people. Giant pieces of lettuce in a salad. Inauthenticity. When people say, “I’m dying.” No, no you are not.

Loss and Grief

Based on my last statement above, this section seemed apropos, and it fit here… On Thursday, June 14th, 2012 I lost my husband, my first love, to a cancerous and terminal brain tumour. I’m not going to tell our story here just yet. But it’s important to me that Andy is here too, it felt uncomfortable and wrong that he wasn’t included in the love section above. I’ve been grieving him and our life together for years now, all whilst finding a new way, a new love, a new life. It’s been a long journey, one that I’m still on. It’s been difficult, sad, challenging, uncomfortable, and weird. I’ll eventually share more.

I Believe

I believe in using Canadian English, the Oxford Comma, two spaces after a period, and good grammar and spelling. I love words. Juxtapositiously, I will also make up words just for fun.

I believe that dedicating myself to this site, honing my passions for food, photography, and writing, along with my insatiable curiosity, will reinvigorate my creativity, ease open my vulnerability, awareness, and confidence. All of which will lead me to a place where what I want to be and what I am are the same.

I believe this will be worth it.