Beyond the Bland – Why Start a New Blog?

This blog is about food, wine, music and friends. It’s about the quest for flavor, a desire for real, substance over appearance. It’s seeking an escape from a world of formulaic, homogenized, and flavor and content free. It’s about pleasure. It’s about passion for excellence. Is it worth seeking a dark chocolate from Madagascar with its deep, rich flavors and nuances of raspberry or is that bar of Hersey’s just fine? Is the difference between the two worth the price and effort? I believe it is.

Have you ever taken a bite of food or a sip of wine that makes you stop and give thanks to be alive? Or hear a song on the radio that demands that you pull over in the breakdown lane to hear it with your full attention? If we regard food as merely sustenance, wine as a means for ingesting alcohol, and music as strictly pleasant background noise, I believe we lose much from the gifts placed before us and live a blander and less meaningful life for it.

We live in a world where appearance trumps substance, convenience overshadows quality, and mass marketed mediocrity becomes the bar by which all is measured. If one’s experience is strictly of lifeless, industrial carrots purchased from a supermarket in perfectly identical pre-cut form, can we expect a view of a carrot as something other than a grudgingly ingested form of substance? Would its consumer have reason or desire to even try a gnarled Chatenay carrot from a farmers’ market? Yet, taking that step would likely be a mind-blowing revelation. A carrot with actual taste. A carrot that one might eat strictly for the pleasure of eating it. A carrot that would rewrite the way one would ever look at and judge carrots again.

Accepting that Chantenay carrot into one’s life is more than just buying a fancy food item. It is providing income and supporting a way of life for a small farmer whose passion is producing an heirloom product of exceeding high quality, it is encouragement for a supplier to carry more than mainstream products, it is a step towards genetic and product diversity and it is a statement against mediocrity. And the payback is pure pleasure, be it a rich and deep carrot soup, or the sweet concentration from roasting or the simple crisp delight of biting into a raw carrot stick with actual taste.

These principles hold equally true for food, for wine, for music and for many other aspects of our lives. And these principles are the foundation for this blog.

As this blog progresses, I want to introduce new ingredients and sources, share techniques that maximize convenience without sacrificing flavors, offer recipes that will tempt readers to try them, review wines that complement those recipes and flavors and maybe suggest some music that might enhance the overall experience.

If by sharing recipes, recently tasted wines, songs, artists and favored sources, I can encourage someone to try something new, bring some pleasure into somebody’s day, support a true artisan, or gain a new friend, my efforts will be more than amply rewarded. If in some small way, I encourage a revolt against mediocrity, hallelujah!