I'm someone who started cooking seriously when I started grad school and decided if I wanted to eat well on a regular basis (and I did) I better learn how on my own. It didn't take long to discover that finding good ingredients was an enormous determinant in my success or failure. When I moved to the Belmont section of Charlottesville, I could at last enjoy the experience of walking to a weekly farmers' market to buy much of my produce during warmer months. Better cooking followed.
By the time I had finished my PhD in US History, I was living in Memphis and had struck up an almost dependent relationship with the one vendor at the city's two-year-old (!?!) farmers' market who had even remotely interesting produce. His name was Keith, and although his farm was in Eastern Arkansas he was for some bizarre reason a Phillies fan -- a fault for which I forgave him as I watched my Mets falter down the stretch in consecutive years. Who else could offer me micro Swiss chard, or ask me what in the hell I was going to do with it -- a question that didn't make much sense to me since he was the one who grew it in the first place. Not that I had any earthly idea what I was going to do. I even resisted the urge to do violence when a different vendor exclaimed incredulously within earshot that he could charge five bucks for squash blossoms and suckers (like me) would pay it. Since then, I've bought organic kale from crunchy Massachusetts girls in the parking lot of a Providence, RI high school and zucchini shaped like tiny hand grenades in the parking lot of a DC bank. More often than not, the chance to think creatively about food on a weekend morning was the highlight of an otherwise miserable week.
I'm not going to stop buying those amazing hand grenade zucchini, but the desire no to drop 30 or 40 dollars every Sunday is waning. Now that we have the chance, I hope my wife and I can grow some cool and tasty stuff ourselves and become a bit more self-sufficient.
For me personally, this blog also represents an opportunity to branch out in new directions in my own writing. I've spent the last decade thinking and writing about 20th century American political history, specifically the contributions the veterans' organization the American Legion made to the political culture. I'm revising a book on the subject that Penn Press will publish eventually. Before that, I wrote about all kinds of things -- contemporary politics, pop culture, sports. Writing again about something not remotely connected to history is going to be good.
