Me, standing by the cliffs of Roussillon in southern France
I’m a 24-year-old book-conservator-in-training, currently working as a copy cataloger in a library. I love to cook, bind books, and work with my hands.
Much to my mother’s chagrin, my passion for cooking started early. At the age of 5, I was reading a picture book that described (in basic terms) how to make custard – just eggs, milk, and sugar! I waited until my mother went downstairs to put the laundry in the dryer, then promptly dumped an entire gallon of milk into a bowl and cracked two eggs into it. As I was staring into the bowl, contemplating the raw, runny yolks staring balefully back up at me, I was busted by my mother. Instead of going ballistic (ok, she went a little ballistic), she sighed and said “ok, let’s use this to make tapioca,” thus teaching me an important lesson in salvaging botched food experiments.
My one party trick is that I have a photographic memory when it comes to food. I can not only remember almost every meal that I have eaten in a restaurant ever, down to each individual ingredient and the way it was presented, but I can do the same thing for everyone else who was eating with me. Totally weird, but fun!
Just a note from the mother of bookish cook–her food experiments continued, but I never made tapioca again-except by choice or family request.
I’m trying your zucchini salad recipe tonight. Just what I was looking for, a way to use the Oregon summer bounty of zooks in a way that is NOT zucchini bread (which really doesn’t use that much zook, anyway!)