Intro To Culinary Education

Or, how a pot of soup started me down the path of the foodie.

I am, somewhat objectively, a foodie.

It brings me no pleasure to report this, as the term suggests a degree of dilettantish insufferability that I wish to avoid owning up to, but facts are facts.

My life and leisure time revolve around food.

Virtually every present I have received in the last decade has been some desired culinary tool, gadget or contraption. Our kitchen’s storage capacity has long since been exceeded, and now, most of the front foyer coat closet space is taken up by things that wouldn’t fit in the cabinets—the pressure cooker, the sous-vide circulator, the fancy Japanese-made rice cooker, the lovingly-seasoned carbon-steel wok, the springform pans, the paella pan, the Detroit pizza pans, the aebelskiver pan.

I have so many cookbooks that the workhorse ones—The Joy of Cooking and whatnot—have been relegated to a utility shelf in the basement, with room left upstairs only for the most display-friendly. Handsome objets d’art like Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusal…