There comes a time in every girl’s life when it’s more important to buy a drill that can push through cement than it is to write about recipes. Right? Or is that just me?
I recently bought a very powerful drill that I now lug up a steep hill to a cliff face occasionally and then create very precise holes, into which I push a tube of glue and a metal hook, of sorts. That’s not to say that I haven’t made time for gardening or continuing to be inspired by the Guardian Food page’s recipes each week, but I don’t post as many recipes.
It’s not that I’ve made or written about everything and will never cook (or blog about it) again. That’d be pretty dumb, and full of hubris. According to my high school English teacher, hubris = the downfall of the romantic hero, which, since you’re reading this blog, is me (which seems even more like hubris when I write it). Over the years, I’ve faced lactose intolerance, then gluten intolerance, then other less-than-lovely digestion challenges. There were also the mountains of cabbages I’ve fermented, $200 sustainable salmon cut into sashimi and/or blowtorched (or both), the great successes of being published in big name publications and (for my readers who go way back) my writing before I eschewed the Oxford comma.
I’ve ventured to Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Peru, Turkey, Barbados, Aruba and across Canada and the US, tasting everything along the way, getting stomach sick, climbing more mountains and generally, well, living. Because my personal goal in life is to get to the end and not be able to say that I haven’t lived. Really lived. Ventured places and did things that scared me, met people who surprised me, learned things that I never would have set out to learn and got decent at the things that I did set out to learn, like gardening and rock climbing and feature writing for major publications, which only came after a lot of rejection (I’m referring mostly to the writing bit, but I suppose my disastrous swiss chard was a form of rejection, too).
So back to that bit about really living. So far, so good. And that drill is definitely helping me along. If that means I spend more days eating beans and vacuum-packed spiced rice cooked over a camp stove, so be it.
Camping food might not as blog-able as a peanut butter love cake or even a fallen chocolate mousse cake, but it is soulfully satisfying in its own way.
So if you ever start thinking, “Gee, I wonder why hasn’t Amie been publishing a lot of recipes on her blog lately,” I invite you to check out the archives. There’s a fun little “Flashbacks” section on the right side of every blog post page. Because it turns out that I’ve lived a lot already, and while I’ll most likely continue to have stories of hundreds of more meals to come, there’s a lot here already to sink your teeth into (if I were writing for certain publications, I’d probably edit that to “into which to sink your teeth,” but that’s really not as satisfying, is it? And satisfaction is extremely important when using a food-based expression on a food blog).
So enjoy the archives until my next recipe post. They’re a veritable feast, full of mixed metaphors, poor editing (I almost wrote “poo editing” by mistake … ) and photography that goes from bad to almost acceptable. But always lots of pleasure, because life’s too short to not explore the world of cuisines, and to keep exploring it, whether you do that from your computer, your kitchen or a plane ride away from home.
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