I would consider myself to be a fairly knowledgeable gourmet with a well experienced palate. I have a thirst for new culinary adventures and an eagerness to learn as much as I can about food, ingredients and preparation techniques. It has not always been this way however, I would have to say not even close. The early part of my life was filled with endlessly insipid meals consisting of my mothers' "cooking." It was never something that was lovingly prepared over the stove or carefully placed in the oven. Why? There was always a way to prepare absolutely anything in the microwave! Potatoes especially played a monotonous role in my everyday eating. Plain old Russets, I can still hear her stabbing away at that poor potato to make "ventilation" holes. Nothing could or ever did help that pathetic spud from turning into a flavorless, dried up, overcooked rubbery piece of shoe leather. Another jaw tiring dish would be the dreaded microwave chicken. Packed in sodium laced water then frozen chicken tenderloins from a 10 pound zip top bag purchased from Sam's Club. They were placed frozen, unseasoned and unattended in the microwave until it adequately resembled my golden retriever's chew toy after a rough day in the yard. And let's not forget what was used to enhance, or shall I say mask these culinary abominations. Prego, by the gallon, also purchased at the dreaded Sam's Club. Jars and jars of the stuff were ladled straight from the jar onto whatever unfortunate, overcooked concoction she so proudly displayed before us. Now it's making more and more sense to me why my sister is a vegetarian! Nothing ever really tasted or looked like anything but dull, dried out chewy toys covered in that room temperature red sauce that was always curiously and annoyingly sweet. That was all I knew and really, I had no problem with that. My naive palate had no clue of the flavors and textures the world had in store for me.
My curiosity was awoken by something not very complex, fancy or unattainable actually. On a day that I was on my own, foraging for food with a friend I was asked if I ate Hawaiian food. I had known about it, tried it a few times but never with a person that could coach me on what was good and how to maximize the full pleasures this humble cuisine had to offer. I wasn't too sure about it though; it was a whole lot of soupy, strange smelling and oddly colored stuff made with ingredients that were quite the deviation from the somewhat "vanilla" fare I had been choking down up to that point. It was at that time that I was hearing my grandmother's voice in my head saying "You neva know if you no like um if you neva go try um....so go, try um go!" Yes, I was pensive about eating this foreign goo but I figured it couldn't be worse than whatever was lodged in my system from the many years of gnawing at my mothers' grub. So there I was, staring down this plate of completely foreign and unknown food, kind of feeling unsure and nervous actually. It was a plate consisting of poi, a carefully steamed then hand pounded taro root; lau lau, taro leaves filled with butterfish, chicken and a delicious cube of pork fat; kalua pig, an entire pig rubbed with Hawaiian sea salt then placed in the ground to steam with hot rocks then covered with bamboo leaves and burlap bags cooked for hours and hours. Lomi salmon, chicken long rice, haupia and rice were also a part of this culinary voyage. I took my first bite and I tried everything individually and was quickly corrected. It was the combining of the different items that made it "broke da mouth" or so delicious apparently. I dipped a succulent strip of the warm shredded pork into the cool, pasty and slightly soured poi. With a deep breath, I placed it gently in my mouth. The combination of salty, sweet and sour, the hot and cold, the gooey poi and the melt-in-your-mouth pork...it was amazing. What my grandmother had been preaching to me all that time about trying new things was completely true. I then tried a few other combinations with what I had on my plate. Lau lau with poi, lau lau with rice, long rice and pork, pork and lomi salmon, rice with long rice. It was what seemed to be an endless array of flavors, textures and sensations all from one plate of food. It was a very foreign concept to me, but I realized that just as there was care put into preparing the food and maximizing the ingredient, there seemed to be thought put into somehow allowing them to marry and complement one another. It was a cohesive plate, not a disjointed dish, it just made sense.
This experience made me think about food for the first time as being more than just a means to fill me up and provide me with energy. I somehow connected with food as if it had saved me from resembling the food I had previously been eating. Food for me was a metaphor for life and by no means did I want to be a dry, stiff, overdone person that relied on monotony for life to be palatable. I wanted adventure, challenge, excitement and passion.
All this from a singular meal served in a generic styrofoam take-out box, eaten with splintering wooden chopsticks on a park bench? Not necessarily. But that was the starting point for me; the gateway to my need to always challenge myself and never become stale or rigid. It was an identity I could be happy with and that has always driven me forward.
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