The Nubbin

I've always been a pretty good cook. My parents, although ex-hippies, were fairly cosmopolitan when it came to food. My suburban Front Range childhood convinced me that grilling meat was the essence of cuisine. Antisocial tendencies meant that summer restaurant jobs were in kitchens, which helped broaden my understanding a bit; it also gave me knife skills and an appropriate awe of the subtleties of the kitchen. Finally, a need to impress women in college (and an off-campus kitchen) led to some personal development, though my cooking was only really good in comparison to the cafeteria.

Six months ago, though, I moved to a small Lakeview apartment with my vegetarian girlfriend, a small savings account, and plans to apply to law school. Underemployment gave me a surplus of free time, and a fixed budget gave me a keen sense of cost. This narrowed my food options pretty significantly; healthy vegetarian diets seem hard enough to maintain, even without the tight budget and compulsive desire to exercise my cooking skills.

Most of the world's regional cuisine developed under similar conditions, it turns out. Really good artisanal food almost always occurs because the people making it didn't have anything else to distract them. Even French cuisine, which I'd always thought of as a bit over-wrought and decadent, focuses on simple ingredients; it's the technique that really elevates it.

So I decided to take a page from their book: limit myself to staples and focus on breadth of technique to get the best food I could from them. I try to study cuisines from a historical and agricultural perspective, since I figure that people who've worked with something for centuries probably know how to use it best. I glean generalities when I can, in a sort of "best practices" way, to expand my options even further. Mostly, though, I just dig through huge old books of recipes and cooking lore, try the things that sound interesting, and try to figure out what's actually going on that makes food taste really good. Then, presumably, I cook them, eat them, and pass them on to you.

P.S. The post is named after our sort-of neighborhood; no one really claims our little bit of it, so we named it ourselves after its undistinguished shape.