New year, new blog

This is the first posting of my first blog ever. Welcome. This blog will be mostly about food and cooking, seasonal eating and sustainable methods of farming and eating, developing relationships with producers, growers, other cooks and people in the community who share these goals.  But mostly, it will be a place to chronicle my year of cooking for my friends and family and semi-professionally. This is a year that has special meaning for me. It was forecast in my chart that 2008 would be a big year for me and my career. I guess that depends on how you define 'big'. I am in the middle of a major career transition, recovering from something I had planned on doing and spent many years preparing for (teaching Italian, literature and film at the college level), earning a Ph.D., and becoming an academic. I now believe this was not the path I was supposed to take and for many reasons which are still only starting to reveal themselves to me. However, this door's closing has opened others that have been only slightly ajar but always enticing to me: writing, cooking non-stop, reading and watching and learning about food, working in a professional kitchen, and now the beginning of a personal project that may take me in many new directions. This is an exploratory year for me, a new beginning and a chance to live differently and to seek new opportunities for teaching, learning, and growing. This time I will do it in the kitchen- my own kitchen and others' kitchens, the kitchen of the restaurant where I work in Nashville, and maybe down the line, a kitchen in another country or part of the world where I will continue this pursuit of all things cultural and culinary. So, welcome to my blog, to my experiments with food and life, and to a place where community is built on gastronomic traditions and something as simple as cooking and eating together. I hope to share ideas, tips, sites, recipes, travel logs, anecdotes, and personal reflections about my year in cooking. Benvenuti e Buon appetito!