What This is About: An Introduction

Where to begin?  It feels like the first day of class, maybe because it's that time of year, when I would spend a minute or so (depending on my mood and the desperation I saw in the faces staring back at me) saying a little about myself.  This worked best with my adult students, who I think liked realizing that there was a human being in front of them, even if he was a nervous little nerd.  The eighteen-year-olds?  They were already checked out, fantasizing about their next Facebook post.

So without any fall classes on the horizon (for the first time in six years) after relocating to the Albany, NY area less than a month ago, it feels right to spend a minute explaining--even if, like so often in class, this is mostly for myself--why I've decided to start a blog, especially one dedicated to food instead of, say, fantasy baseball or the joys of nit-picking.

In some ways, it's simple.  I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about eating and drinking.  A lot of my time spent online, whether it's reading reviews or searching for new places to eat, has to do with food.  And after reading so many other people putting their two cents out there about this stuff, I can't help but feel that, gosh darn it, maybe I have something worth saying, too.

I also like to think this blog can serve as a sort of nudge for me, a reason to finally do some things I've talked about doing for a while.  Cooking more at home.  Learning to bake bread.  Sharpening my knife skills.  Hell, maybe even learning how to do some homebrewing (though that could get really messy in the current place, a problem since even in making simple recipes I often leave the kitchen looking like the home of a botched science project).

And it's also a way to work on learning some new digital photography skills, how to use Photoshop better, that sort of thing.  I'll keep most of the photography to what I'm doing at home and hope that I can describe restaurants well enough without any visual aid.

But as with everything else, I reserve the right to change my mind and do things differently--no matter how ugly, messy, or unappetizing the results may be.