Good Food, Wine, Travel, Gardening, Hiking- How did I end up with these as life long interests?

Before we get going on our journey, please note that I am new to blogging, new to WordPress, and am figuring this out as I go along. I am doing this for fun, hopefully we will have some together! It is not my intention to monetize this site, I am neither seeking, nor accepting affiliate revenue.

Most of these are not things I was exposed to growing up. I am a first-generation Yankee; born and raised in NJ (between Turnpike exits 4 and 5). Born of parents from Georgia who met in high school in suburban Atlanta. I grew up with grits, biscuits and pot roast. Maxwell house coffee, boxed cake mix, and hamburger helper were staples.

My dad wanted to explore the US; so we did, the only way we could afford to- camping. My grandmother lived with us, so there were 5 of us (Mom, Dad, Nan, my younger sister and I) in a station wagon (un airconditioned) with a test on top. Then dad fitted out a pop up tent camper pulled with a van (Air conditioned! what luxury!). 4 week cross country trips, 3 of them. My adult self says these must have been wonderful experiences. Remember that between New Jersey and the Grand Canyon lie many, many miles of Ohio and Nebraska. I was 7, 9 then 11 and my memory is that I was not a “happy camper”. I vowed I would never do this to my kids, and whatever else I did or did not do, I did not do that. I was and still am a reader. The family legend is that we would cruise up to some spectacular scenic landmark, I would take a look, say well that’s nice and go back to my book. In the last van we had, dad rigged a reading light in the back row for me, probably in self-defense. My sister and I were each given a box to fill with whatever toys or treasures we wanted with us in the van. I taped the top flaps of mine up and filled to above the brim with books. But since the box had to fit in a particular spot I had to edit my collection. I probably read them all twice.

But we grew up. My dad, an electrical engineer, travelled all the world for his job and before I graduated from high school, we took a trip to Europe. We visited some spots he had enjoyed in his travels as well as others we all helped pick. I love European history and wanted to see the Bayeaux tapestry and Westminster Abbey. My parents chose to some World War II sites and my grandmother wanted to see the beaches in Normandy and its military cemetery to visit the grave of a nephew. We did all these and more, ate pommes frites from roadside stands in Belgium, sausages in Germany and lovely meals from London to Switzerland. We stayed in charming B &B’s, big city hotels and one particularly magical hotel in the Black Forest of Germany.

Wine wasn’t a part of my life growing up. My parents had Manhattans at bedtime, and while my mother enjoyed wine, the cheaper the better (she was always a bargain hunter). In college I met people with different experiences and my college roommate introduced me to French chardonnay. Together we explored wine and cooking meals and sharing wine with friends. I will forever be grateful!!!

After college and graduate school, by happenstance I ended up in the food industry, big corporate food, General Foods – now Kraft. I was in the Maxwell House division the finance group. But despite working in the corporate headquarter of the company that makes Minute Rice and Jello; there were food industry journals around and bulletins from the test kitchens, market share data on GF and its competitors and information on what was going on in American homes and restaurants. I remember a coffee buyer saying that Americans drank coffee they would not feed to pigs in Europe and ate commoditized food of similar quality. But this was the early 80’s and things were beginning to change.

My life was changing too. The definition of success at that time was built around climbing the corporate ladder, and as a woman, breaking the glass ceiling. The coursework in my MBA program at Duke as built around that framework, as were most other programs at the time. It did not take long to discover what crap that was. It was just not the path for me. But I won the jackpot meeting a wonderful guy who became my husband and my fellow traveler through all the adventures to follow. The corporate thing worked for him though and we traveled that path for a while.

So having learned what I didn’t want to do, the next step was figuring out what I did. Food was one thing I loved; good food, real food- not made in a lab. We lived in White Plains, NY with easy access to New York City and its wealth of food options. White Plains had your regular supermarkets, but also small local produce markets where I found stuff I had never seen before- things like fresh basil and bok choi that would not make their way to the average grocery store for some time. It sounds so elementary now- but what a difference fresh herbs and good produce made! I started experimenting with fresh herbs and seeking out better quality dried spices and other cooking components that were not staples of the grocery store of the time.

If I had trouble finding fresh, quality stuff in the NY York suburbs, how much harder would it be in other places? My parents had a mail order business selling restoration parts for 65 Mustangs. So I knew the mechanics of how this could work. I researched suppliers, had a logo developed for the business “In Good Taste”, did some legal stuff, researched packaging, printed up a catalog, bought some inventory and took out an add in Bon Appetit magazine. I had been taking cooking classes and developing recipes featuring some of the more unusual spices I was selling that were not in the supermarket of the 80’s. I included these in the catalog and sent out newsletters featuring more as time went on using these as sales tools. Today that would be a blog; so really, I have been doing this for 40 years!

The business was not such a rousing success that it was filling my time, but I was getting known as a cook. People started asking me to cook things for them and all of a sudden I was catering. I had picked the In Good Taste name originally as it could be used for a variety of concepts which was a bonus. I did a wedding, a bunch of cocktail parties, birthday events and prepared meals to deliver for events and holidays. It was fun, it was exciting, and it was exhausting. I crawled into bed about midnight on Christmas Eve and realized I just couldn’t go on like this. I had been getting help as needed from friends and my live in dishwasher husband but I either needed to grow the business, perhaps by getting a partner or scale it back to a more manageable level.

While contemplating all this I tried a few other things- somehow I decided to give real estate sales a try. This was not a good fit. I thought about packaging up spice kits to sell to the growing gourmet store market. Sales- just not my thing. One nasty cold damp winter day I was home on the couch with a nasty cold when my husband came home and said- “so how would you feel about moving to California”?

We lived in the San Francisco bay area and traveled around the state- ate lots of good food. Alice Waters was in Berkeley and while we never managed to eat there her influence was all over the bay area and beyond. I discovered the bounty of California produce and wine. Oh the wine. We ventured to Napa, Sonoma, Monterey visiting wineries. I joined a great hiking group of other newcomers to the area and traveled all over the area. I logged more than 100 winery stops and learned so much about food and wine. Corporations routinely moved folks around the US to give them varied experiences so we made lots of friends who like us were in California for a limited time and happy to take advantage of the opportunity to explore. A bunch of us would load up Jimmy’s van and head off to Yosemite, or Sequoia, or Big Sur for a weekend of camping, hiking and good meals around a campfire. Fueled by beer and “snake bite” medicine we never saw a snake but we had plenty of Jack Daniels on hand just in case. It was a magical few years.

But life moves on and so did we. We settled into real life, first in Dover Delaware, then Houston, Delaware (population 352, so not to be confused with that place in Texas), then Chester County Pennsylvania. There were lots of adventures along the way that we will explore some other time.  I was lucky to make many wonderful friends, have a career at an organization I loved (University of Delaware Small Business Development Center), give birth to 3 fantastic human beings and was blessed to be able to retire early enough to explore. So on to the journey!