On The Kindness And Wisdom Of Strangers...

I started this blog 5 months ago for a sort of cheap therapy and career counseling as much as anything. My life had undergone a massive overhaul over the past few years, and having left a big chunk of my adult life behind me - a marriage, some assets, a few friends, a career - I decided to do something I hadn't done since I was 14 years old, resolved that I wouldn't be controlled by my father's money, and took a job at a mom and pop Korean pharmacy helping out with odd chores and learning that elderly Korean folk think ginseng and antibiotics cure *EVERYTHING*.

In a happy twist of karma, after a few years of fleeing, then floundering, then wandering, and finally regrouping, I met and fell in love with a fairly awesome fella who was willing to let me work through my issues, and on my passions, without the primary goals of making money, supporting a family, feeding investments, and occasionally keeping up with the Joneses. Given a truly rare opportunity to introspect and explore, I put my head down and returned to writing, and cooking, and writing about cooking most of the time, and then writing about some stuff that wasn't about cooking some of the time. 

That last stuff helped me move through some very difficult issues and feelings confronting me in the aftermath of so much upheaval. But, as a fellow chowhound foodnik who was kind enough to read my blog gently and thoughtfully remarked, that stuff was heavy and negative and, well, counterproductive. In the nicest way, she encouraged me to focus on the writing that is about the cooking, and to continue my healing by sharing my passion for food with others.

This post and tonight's tataki - dedicated to a cool chick(let)
I've never met... :)

And pigheaded though I may be, sometimes I do lift my head up from the trough to listen. I mean, I'm not sorry I wrote the stuff. It was a necessary catharsis. But she was right - to continue to write  about and meditate on it would in the end just stifle the good and real progress I've made in returning to my bliss... 

So while I will continue to hone the writing chops on occasional off topics in my new, non-food blog, I will, at the good, kind and wise advice of a stranger, refocus this blog to the pursuit of sharing my love of food in the preparation, eating, and learning of it.

shinae