other lands

I said it, I'm an eclectic cook, that, with respect to the geographic origin of the inspiration of my meals or their ingredients. I LOVE to travel, and I'm quite literal, although being literal does not necessarily restrict me to moving my entire frame across parallels and meridians. During the first part of my life that was mainly accomplished thanks to my imagination and my outdated Soviet-era atlas, -I must confess that >90% of the geography that this adult knows she learned it when she was 11 yrs old or younger. I don't know where it came from, but my mother had a huge map of the world (a Soviet-era one) with its economic and natural resources for me at home. At some point, I decided to hang it on one of the walls of my bedroom. It was, of course, just another oddity for my friends of the time -and one of which I wasn't embarrassed since, for this at least, I had the support and even the encouragement of my elders. I traveled far across my blue-and-yellow Earth with no country borders, only ugly symbols of industries and mineral resources (outdated, I must insist, yet it made me question why Africa was so rich in natural resources yet so poor, a question not very obvious to the straight forward thinking of the child I was; and it also made me realize how poor in natural resources my own country was, a truth somewhat burdensome for such a young person). I challenged myself to locate strange -'ztan' countries in the map, but most of the time I got frustrated, the gigantic map was cool, but I liked city names, frontiers, and, most importantly, geographic accidents. The atlas, the book, was much more fun. I have kept a love for maps since then, though I don't hang them any more, I rather send maps to my dad, a strange way of making both him and myself happy.
I didn't travel, physically, until I was already a grown up person, and my contacts with foreign things were random and infrequent. I was born and raised in an island, a geographic and also a cultural island. The closest thing I had to anything outside my latitude and longitude were my own genes, and yet the terrible economic situation of the country when I grew up (and I think ever since it emerged from the sea, really) didn't permit for traditions to be kept. Adults already had a hard time preparing the most basic daily meals, how could they then afford worrying about oriental spices or traditional ingredients. Ah, the language of my grandfather was also lost, a pity, really, but I was the youngest of his descendants, I wish I had been with him more, oh boy, I would have learned (they told me I was already learning when I was a little child). Now I am not looking forward to learning Chinese any time soon, sad, again, but a predictable consequence; I am very much an islander, ...a roaming islander, but that's just a whole another -and recurring- topic.

Books were the natural vehicle, no matter how common place this sounds, books are "the" great vehicle for traveling, ...and art. When I was a child, I was a vicious book worm, and I had a beautiful catalog of the National Museum of Fine Arts. Also, I had a powerful imagination.

Just because I have to work now, and I am a boring adult, I will cut short my rambling. I wanted to come to the point of why discovering new foods is such a gratifying experience for me. It's like traveling in a sense, and I believe it is a quite material, factual experience. I think I get to "know" something of other places, my mind gets broadened my the experience, sometimes catastrophic, sometimes quite nice. ...Also, because cooking is a bit of an intellectual enterprise for me, a very pleasurable one.
I was going to write about the octopus I prepared today. I was, of course, going to celebrate myself because I recreated a dish I tasted over two years ago at a Spanish restaurant. A tapa dish, very simple, yet I realize now, very unforgettable. Please go to the next post if you want to learn about it.
Must work now. Adios!