I was a sous-chef at six, at the James Beard House no less. Don’t believe me? That’s because you haven’t met my mother. As one of Mr. Beard’s cooking school graduates, she deployed what she learned from the culinary giant to transform our tiny townhouse kitchen into a battlefield canteen, and conscripted my sister and me as soldiers in her years-long campaign to outperform every dinner and party hostess in Manhattan. While you were watching Gilligan’s Island, I was tearing from peeling onions, or dressing an oven burn. While your parents were prattling to their friends about your precocious choice of kidneys off a French menu, my mother was persuading Oscar, our reluctant Madison Avenue butcher, to order the succulent morsel of lamb that we would wield to floor a visiting London gourmet. No, we didn’t cook him the brain, or some gland. We fed him the fetus.

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HELLO

All 10 of you. Or 110? Whoever you are, thank you for reading.

I migrated myself to the US recently, which went relatively smoothly. Migrating this blog was another matter. Some of you alerted me you received duplicates of old posts. All comments on the most recent post, The James Beard House, disappeared, along with the post itself.

Then the whole site disappeared, and while I saw metaphor in a vanished past, I was bummed, until a technician at GoDaddy who owed me no favors took a deep breath, dove down into the site, and surfaced ninety minutes later with the sunken treasure.

I’ve been holding my own breath, and thank each of you who has encouraged me to keep writing.

Exhale, then post.

Again, thanks for reading…….

This began as a search for content. Not someone else’s. My own.

I was under pressure from the two ladies at the social media agency.  They were my friends’ capable daughters, and when I hired them I naively thought the deal was this: they download my bank of food photos from my restaurants in Bali, add them to the ones they would take, post on a contractually agreed upon schedule in some clever, fan-building way, and, most importantly leave me alone.

“But we have fans now, and they expect something for their enthusiasm,” the ladies explained, a few months into our contract. They pitched a weekly contest that would require little of me, and only a little knowledge of our restaurants by the fans. Please, go ahead. Reward their loyalty with free meals.

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