My personal odyssey; my culinary evolution

Hedonistic food soul that I am...I was a product of my mothers TV dinner mentality, happily gorging myself on her time honored recipes lovingly handed down from her mother...Kraft macaroni and cheese in a box, Swanson's T.V. Dinners and Hormel chili in a can...what more could a thirteen year old male ask for? Eating out was saved for special occasions and in the small town (no longer small) outside of Detroit where I grew up most restaurants were of your small town diner variety...my mother became big on the all you can eat buffet not only in the literal sense but unfortunately in the physical sense...thirty-five pounds later and two years older I came to the realization that not every one's mother took zip lock baggies to the all you can eat buffet and sugar actually came in five pound bags and not in those little pink packages...I blithely grappled through school and years of school lunches made with congealed fried bologna sandwiches and the occasional soupy rice pudding...I recently made a fried bologna sandwich, slathered with mayonnaise and slapped between two pieces of white bread, it was good for the first few bites...but then reality kicks in and you realize that you're eating something so bad for you, a cholesterol laden time bomb...in your youth your innocence protects you, there is no ten second rule, it falls on the ground, you pick it up and eat it, germs are not existent, you happily charge through childhood eating dirt and boogers (I deny the latter)...unfazed...Until you get older and start thinking like an adult and knowing...that's the key...knowing...that fried bologna sandwiches and their ilk are bad...bad...bad...! It wasn't until I moved to Honolulu and went to a restaurant called '3660 on the Rise' that I had my first gastronomical orgasm, I ordered the exotic mushroom ravioli, a wild and frivolous step for me, but I knew that I was in search of that elusive something that makes your mouth zing. Good...food...glorious food! I took a bite...I tasted..and Hallelujah, Mother of God and all his angels I had my first serious case of the food goosebumps! I have been in search of the goosebumps ever since... I became a glutton!...an epicurean hunter in search of goosebumps!!!...chicken long rice, manapua, lomi salmon, plate lunches with the obligatory two scoops of rice and macaroni salad, it became a challenge to hunt down the best plate lunch, which didn't necessarily come from a restaurant with white tablecloths and a waiter named Andre', but from the Mom and Pops food wagons that frequented Makaha.

Once I was the lucky recipient of a dinner invitation to a small Japanese family type restaurant in Moilili that featured a traditional multi course dinner called a Kaiseki...nine glorious food courses of artfully prepared and presented dishes with pared wines...I had also evolved into a somewhat of a food snob and began to appreciate not only the taste of what I was served but the appearance...not longer content to order from just any old fast food menu I began to search for food nirvana...of course all artfully presented! and then I met a local girl...no small feat for me! Whatever! and ....could the food Gods finally have smiled on me? could it be that...gasp! She was more of a food snob than I was! No first date jitters for us! Nimbly winding her way through the snobbiest of menu's, waiters deftly taking her orders, she pointed, she advised, she knew what she wanted...Chateaubriand for two, aubergines in a robust garlic sauce, delicate petit fours, saddles of veal...I was enthralled! I was hungry! I was in love!

But culinary life was not without it's faux paux, ahhh faux paux's...that happy state of ignorance!
I remember when presented with my first finger bowl, I treated it as an exotic cocktail thereby earning the everlasting derision of the waiter that no amount of a gratuity could erase...and so the quest began, tentatively at first...exploring an exotic menu item...a sample of this, a taste of that...feeling all the while like Oliver Twist in Charles Dickens when he held out his bowl and said "Please Sir...I want some more?"