What is Kitchen Riffs?

Flavor.  What is it?  Where is it?  How to achieve it? How to enjoy it?  Exploring flavor is the theme of this blog, and we’ll search for it wherever we can find it – if necessary, even looking in all the wrong places.  This blog is about finding flavor, learning flavor, preparing flavor.

Although Kitchen Riffs’ focus will be on how I prepare food and drink in my own kitchen, I’ll also visit other kitchens – restaurants’ or friends’ kitchens, both at home and abroad – in hopes of discovering new ideas, ingredients, or techniques.

Who Is Kitchen Riffs?

I’m an eater from way back.  Since birth, to be precise.

In my early years, eating was primarily a matter of survival.  Taste was secondary. 

One story about my childhood that my family gleefully repeats concerns an incident when I was perhaps age two or three.  I was outside and spied a caterpillar.  Something — curiosity?  hunger?  quest for flavor?  all of the above? — compelled me to reach out, grab the caterpillar, and transport it to my mouth.  My frantic mother – “my child is eating wild fauna!” – intervened. 

Welcome!

Welcome to Kitchen Riffs!  This is my first blog and I have much to learn.  The next time I post  (in a few days) I’ll describe my vision for Kitchen Riffs and what sort of content I hope to provide.

Over the next few weeks there will be relatively few posts.  I’ll be taking this time to set up my Blogger template, learn the mechanics of posting, figure out how to include photographs on the blog, and so forth.   No doubt these initial posts will exhibit some of the mistakes and errors of a newbie.

I expect I’ll have the mechanics of running a blog sorted out by the middle of January, 2011.  At that time I’ll be posting on a regular basis.