Bonjour et Grosse Bisoux!

Hello all -

I write to you after a delicious baking feat - organic chocolate chip cookies, from my oven to my mouth. The residual smell of these seems to mingle quite nicely with my current listening, Bach's English suite in G minor for keyboard. Why hippie cookies and stuffy music complement each other, I do not know, but I'm choosing not to question this.

That should tell you something about myself. I am a music major in voice performance, obsessed in every way shape and form, since I left the womb. I could write entries and entries about the different pieces I've studied, or my favorite components of theory, or what classical singers I prefer, but that would be heinously boring for most people. So I come to you with my second passion.

Food.

Who doesn't like food? I mean, we need it in order to NOT DIE. So we might as well enjoy it. And I enjoy it more than most people I know, perhaps to an unusual degree. I will quote my mother in a tender home video from when I was 18 months old:

"True to my child's character, Kaley ate an entire chicken breast and thigh. And then it was 'more chicken mommy!!'"

Maybe food and music are somehow intertwined in my weird brain chemistry - both are arts of sense, developments of basic human instinct that are, in many ways, entirely self-obsessed. So maybe I'm not intelligent or talented at all, just obsessed with my senses. Who knows.

So, I cook, and I eat. And I consider myself a pioneer of sorts with the way I rip up my pantry. Who knew that sauteed raisins tasted marvelous with Irish cheddar?

Which brings me to my "point of view", the reason I believe I need to rub all of this in the Internet's face. Most people who discover these things about food pursue it, trying culinary school, or business, or some way of inventing new food for the world as a career. Well, I tried that. This summer I cooked at a popular, high-end Seattle Italian trattoria, an institution in this city, and for the most part it was a definite positive experience. But me - an artist, a solider of expression - well, food for me is most enjoyed in lavish prose accompanied by some lovely Bach or Dvorak, not by screaming angry Italian men and moody waiters and tickets and dishes and bleach rags and metal tongs and STRESS. Unfortunately, the production end of the food industry is not for me. But the artistic end can be.

And that is why I write this blog as the Queen of Culture, in all its forms. I will write primarily about my experiences with food, but included in this is inevitably my rich life experience with travel, art, music, and theater. For, as I learned as a child in France (don't worry, you will be hearing much about that) - food is really a LIFE pleasure that deserves the utmost respect and leisure. I'm the kind of cook that wants to see the people eat. That wants to talk with them, to play them some music, to be human with them.


Bon appetit!