Contributors
Jax
I’m a Jersey girl who grew up with a Sicilian father and a Jewish mother. Needless to say, but I was exposed to some GREAT eats from an early age.
My dad was a quasi-chef and I learned much about cooking from him. From my mother I take an ability to bake breads, cakes, pies, and the most incredible butter cookies in the world.
However, growing up my palate was limited to the basic cooking of these two cultures, and not much else. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I really started experimenting with cooking, and different kinds of phood.
I first started experimenting with other kinds of phoods when I moved to California and was working in a health food grocery store, surrounded by all different flavors of people. It is here that I learned about Mexi-Cali cooking, and was given proper introduction to Asian cuisine.
Spending time with my Mom who lived in Dallas exposed me to Tex-Mex which was a surprising departure from the styles of Mex cooking I’d learned in California.
While living in Massachusetts I picked up traditional New England styles of cooking, mainly incorporating all of the fall harvest into wonderful soups, stocks, and meals.
I moved back to Jersey for a brief while and immersed myself in the phoods of those cultures that had taken root near my hometown, mainly Korean, Indian, and Japanese.
Currently, I live in Portland, ME and am continually finding both traditional and new ways to incorporate all of the amazing seafood we have available to us in to my cooking.
Right now my main phood obsessions are Vietnamese, Mexican (Yucatan Peninsula,) and Thai. I’ve also recently found out about health issues that plague my family, and in an attempt to thwart them have radically changed my diet into one that is much healthier, less sweet, and less carb driven. I hope to be able to incorporate my love of exotic cooking into my new diet plan to create gorgeous, healthy, and tasty phood.
See all of Jax's posts.Lex
I was a culinary student focused mainly on breads and pastries, but required to take all the cooking classes for the degree regardless of their focus. I’m not in school for the moment, as we moved before I finished my degree, and now I’m somewhere between waiting to establish residency (for those sweet deals on in-state tuition) and procrastinating.
Most of my posts to this site will be about what I did at home and more often than not, include pictures.
We bought two pounds of Fleischmans’s yeast at BJ’s wholesale club in November 2005, so expect to see lots of bread.
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Lisa
I love food. I love it. Oh and I’m very much carniverous…
I have found that food is often the base interest that I have with my closest friends.
I wish I could say that I’m like really creative but I’m not as creative as some…but I don’t really care because I still love to eat and I enjoy cooking (when I have energy) :)
Not sure what else to write…so this is good for now I guess :)
See all of Lisa's posts.MJ
I’m a native Texan who has been recently transplanted to Baltimore, Maryland. My current phood goal is to learn to cook the cuisine native to my new state. I’m also trying to find favorite phood haunts—places to eat, places to shop, etc. Suggestions are always welcome.
My phoodadventures started quite early, as I had to learn to cook when I was quite young. Because we didn’t keep ready-made sweets in the house, those were the first things I learned to cook. By the time I was ten or twelve, I was making cakes, pies, cookies, and candies from scratch. Next came entrees and side dishes. By the time I made my first full-blown Thanksgiving dinner for thirty when I was eighteen, I had been preparing complete meals for some years.
I’m a “homely” cook. Only when I bake or make sweets or try something new do I use recipes. Other than that, I just make it up as I go. Some things work; others are total flops. I learn through trial and error, much to the chagrin of those who are forced to eat my cooking.
Though I grew up on a cattle ranch and didn’t first go to a proper sit-down restaurant until I was a teenager, I have a pretty diverse palate. I’m not afraid to try new tastes. If you grow up willing to try such bizarre tastes as the dried pods of stinging nettles (quite nutty but a bitch to harvest) or the deep-fried testicles of turkeys (won’t be doing that again anytime soon), there isn’t much you aren’t willing to try at least once.
There are some fairly pedestrian phoods I do refuse to eat, however: liver, beets, turnips, and cooked carrots. It’s odd since I will eat the gravy made from liver, and I have made exceptions for mashed turnips when they were mashed with other things. I even let myself try shredded pickled beets as a garnish, and while I love fresh carrots, I cannot endure them cooked in any fashion.
This is the part where I have to give a shout-out to my buddy Roman. He explains below how we came up with the whole “phood” concept in the first place. Ours is a friendship that was originally based almost entirely around our mutual love of garlick, but I like to believe it has transcended even that! After more than eight years of acquaintance we finally in person. What a great guy! Now that we live on the same coast, I hope we get to see more of one another.
I also have to give kudos to my darling, Lex, who conceptualized this entire site gave it life. Without her, Roman and I would still just be talking about a phood-based blog. She is my first lady of phood and the Captain to my Tenille.
See all of MJ's posts.Roman
well, i’m not a culinary student like lex, i’m a first year nursing student. i just happen to like food, especially phood. i do some cooking myself from time to time but i definitely enjoy cooking for others (especially my new favorite cuisine, indian). but also enjoy other people’s cooking. come to think of it, who doesn’t when they’re good cooks, right?
i guess this is where we should give a bit of a definition of the spelling of food.
picture yourself back in the land of 33.6K modems, before instant messaging as we know it had really taken off, back when talkers and irc were the main way people would chat online. quite a while ago when you think about it. it was on one of these talkers that i met MJ.
i can’t exactly remember how it happened, but it turned out that whenever she and i would chat, we ended up talking about our passion for food: the most recent excursions to food establishments, our lust for búfalo chipote sauce, recipes, what we had had to eat that involved garlick (a typo that somehow stuck in our conversations and still use nowadays). there would always be chat about food. if i remember correctly, somehow phood came about because it was a play on my name on the talker, phooz. then it turned into a term we used for food we had/made/read about was so amazingly delicious that we had to share it with one another it deserved to be called phood.
i plan to post on here from time to time. it may be a recipe for a dish i just made, a dish, or even review restaurant, or something along those lines. check in from time to time!
See all of Roman's posts.