Wow, it's hard to get back on this horse (or whatever the saying is)... I've been thinking a lot about what to say here.

When I was growing up, family meals and food were an important part of our lives. I don't remember a time when I didn't hang out in the kitchen with my parents and help them prepare dinner. There was always some miraculous alchemy in cooking that appealed to my artistic side, I think... and then something about writing down a recipe to preserve it was sort of scientific.

My mom had among her things decades worth of recipes clipped out from magazines and newspapers, some of which I don't remember her or my dad ever making, and some which one of them made over and over. She also had a copy of the first recipe I ever wrote down, when I was about 7-- it is for Lo Mein. My dad was really into cooking Chinese food when I was growing up, and I must have been inspired by that.

I was always a bit of a picky eater as a kid... never really liked fruit, didn't start to eat fish or seafood until I was 11 or 12 (I think it was a result of my revulsion with canned tuna, which I still maintain to this day-- Otis only eats it when I am out of the house, which is sweet of him), hated fat on meat. Instead of making special meals for me my parents would just push me off into the kitchen to cook for myself, which I think was a great model.

We ate a lot of hippie and vegetarian food when I was growing up, which was great (although my dad cooked more meat than we would probably have eaten if my mom was exclusively in charge of cooking). My mom went through lots of different experimental phases, including macrobiotic, make-your-own-yogurt, only whole grains, and much more. But regardless she was always fundamentally into the idea that food is more than simply something you eat... it's inherently important, and transformative.

My mom loved to bake bread from the Tassajara Bread Book, and I would stand on a stool and help her knead on the counter. And of course I helped her make her famous quiche (included here), which I made a week or so before she died... I brought her a piece while she was staying in hospice. She didn't have much of an appetite but she wolfed down the whole slice and then told me it had too much garlic in it.

Anyway, this is coming out as a whole bunch of babbling, but my point has been, thanks, Mom, for refusing to bring me up on crap fast food and boxed meals. Learning to cook as a kid, and appreciating what really good food is, was an amazing gift.

(Also thanks Dad. Especially for bringing your love for Asian flavors to the conversation.)