When I was a bit younger, I had an alter ego named Couteau Bonswan, a chef who fell somewhere between Julia Child, John Cleese’s French character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a moustache-twirling silent movie villain. I invoked this character by wearing a cut-off pant leg on my head (read: chef’s hat) and brandishing knives in the kitchen. It seemed only natural that I resurrect this persona for a food-related website.

I’ve always been a picky eater - legendarily so amongst my family. I got much better after heading off to college and realizing that, as an adult, proper etiquette calls for one to At Least Taste It. I began to like (and even crave) meats that I had previously forsaken and opened up my palate to things that I had shunned in the past. The advent of the Food Network helped, along with the old favorites of Julia Child, Graham Kerr, and America’s Test Kitchen, to make me more curious about food.

As I was nearing the end of my undergraduate time at RPI in Troy, NY in 2001, I gave serious thought to heading off to culinary school, possibly to become a food stylist. I had no food experience though, apart from washing dishes and pouring Ensure in a nursing home dining room in high school. In an attempt to remedy this to help my applications, I started working at one of the finer restaurants in Troy, doing prep work (which ranged from picking the poop out of shrimp, to plating food, to burning my hands on pans, to dumping a pot of water on the floor…). That lasted about a week. I found that I absolutely hated the atmosphere of the restaurant kitchen. This tempered my desire to attend culinary school quite a bit and that notion was set aside.

Through a series of twists and turns, I ended up in Ithaca, NY. I’m currently working on finishing up my master’s degree in historic preservation planning at Cornell University. Contained within my apartment are my husband, Joe, and our cat, Brand O. Although I’ve abandoned the notion of food as a career, I’m still interested in eating on a daily basis and attemping to make food that I like. *As of September 1st-ish, 2006, we’ve moved back up to Syracuse, NY. Still working on thesis and another cat, Cheddar, has been added.

I’m especially interested in regional cuisine, particularly the foods unique to Upstate New York. I’m also trying to learn more about sustainable food, heirloom varieties, and the ways in which food reaches us and how we get to it.

A few final tidbits:

• DOB: 12/15/1978, which makes me 27 as of this writing. I’ll let you calculate in the future.
• The header graphic was created from a photo of hot chocolate from Serpico’s Diner in Syracuse, NY and a snippet of the wallpaper from my Grandma Noble’s old kitchen.