COOKING BACK: A FOOD RUN

 

I have been writing on this platform (COOK REVIEW) for ten years now not counting cooking for the direct and dimensional creative task of food blogging it beginning in Portland, Ore. in the year 2000 continuing on to NYC as a professional cook (so that's more than twenty years of personal investment in food) - sharing my home recipes and my lifestyle adventures around the kitchen and my world travels in search of the perfect plate - not to mention my devotion to following and reading to works of my culinary teachers and chefs Anthony Bourdain, Patience Gray, Mark Bittman, Melissa Clark, Sam Sifton, Rachel Khoo, Pete Wells, Ruth Riechl, Ligaya Mishan, Bernardo Ayson, Claude Tayag, best of all my late grandfather and my dearest mother, and many others I'm met personally and those cookbooks and restaurant reviews I had read constantly and had influenced my writing every step of the way - counting all those times almost a generation of heart's work to fill the stomach (vice-versa) - I have to say that looking back: it has been a good run; or more precisely: cooking back, it has been a food run.  The truth is I wasn't really anticipating a pivotal decision about my beloved food writing at this juncture in my life (to be announced here shortly) until last week when I had compiled my life's work in food on book form using a blogger app that would design and format it automatically (see photo), and was astonished to behold more than 300 pages of cook reviews and recipes drawn from an experience I would not exchange for anything in the universe (my food writing is intertwined with poetry and that's why it had made all the difference and meaning to all my sacrifices to it - writing alone is hard but incorporating physical cooking is harder to synergize both to a creative force) that is profoundly and indefatigably a work of love. 

So my dear readers, without further ado, I had realized the other day that my soul for all this work had been put to good use, had taken its destined course, and that not growing any younger I had better reward it a rest I think it fully deserves. Yet, l leave behind a volume of paper memories I can proudly call my own COOK REVIEW in my lap, as I rock my sad heart for how bittersweet it has been (and will be) for having had the honor and pleasure to have written my "soul's food," and you were there to partake. Sundays is my blog day and this will be my last and I am sorely writing it. I had never considered my blog as just another social media post - it had never been that for all these years, and those intimate to me know that first hand - that, again, this blog, because my team here is poetry, therefore it has been my life's work (yes I am a cook but I am really a trained poet) and this tandem I will dearly, dearly miss. Tomorrow is the beginning of May month, a "new year" for flowers seasons, for mother's celebrations, for children's days commemorations in some parts of the world, like in S. Korea, my adopted second home where I had left behind a poetry school for gifted students. Tomorrow will be a new beginning I trust the universe to show me the way to a second wind I could ride out moving forward - and see what happens. It's not that I will stop cooking. I will only stop writing about it. Cooking will be what its provenance had always mean to me: it is about my mother gathering her two children around the table to eat, because food was her best expression and nurture of love for us. I will be like her now, so to speak, feeding the tired child in me having played all this time in the neverland of food, and it's time to go home.     

Thank you to my dear sister for printing my "book" (she will be mailing it from California and had send me the picture you see here). Thank you to Sal Paradise, my ghost editor (year 2020-21). Thank you to my muses; you know who you are, heaven and earth. Above all, thank you EDR for Portland, New York and the world (especially for our foodie friends in Paris and Brive-la-Gaillarde).

Farewell everyone. So long, my COOK REVIEW. I had loved you so much.

"And now, though I have not yet recovered fully from the fatigue of my journey, it is already the sixth day of the Ninth Moon, and I wish to go to Ise Shrine to see the ceremony that takes place only once every twenty-one years, when the Diety is transferred to a newly built shrine. So I shall set off once more in a boat and go to see the wedded rocks on Futami-ga-Ura shore where the clams are so delicious, but now, alas,

Sadly, I part from you;

Like a clam torn from its shell,

I go, and autumn too."

                             (my Master, Basho)