I Wrote A Book
I love food, so I did the only rational thing I could do and wrote a book about food. Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American follows the history of Italian American food as it evolved in the United States from the food of immigrants into a national cuisine. The book was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2022. Buy it from Bookshop or Amazon.
Before I Wrote A Book
Before I wrote a book, I liked to blog. Since I also liked eating food, it only seemed logical that I would blog about food. All The Things I Eat collects food pictures and food stories, and is all about having fun. A lot of the content is old, but some of it is new.
Here is what I wrote when I first created this blog a decade ago:
I like to eat. I grew up watching Julia Child and The Frugal Gourmet on PBS. When I was ten or eleven I wanted a chef themed birthday party. We gave away cutting boards as party favors and everyone rolled out their own pizza dough before piling on the toppings. My birthday is in July and we had the oven on for two hours cooking pizzas.
Fine food costs money. Often it costs more than I had, so I taught myself how to cook all the things I wanted to eat but otherwise couldn’t pay for. I have no formal training, though about a decade ago I spent an evening cooking alongside a friend who at the time held a job on the line at a high end restaurant.
I spent a year living as a vegetarian. I gave up meat during the second week of college, in no small part because of the cafetaria food. A month long trip in Italy the following year reversed my position. Besides, I couldn’t exactly decline the thin slices of prosciutto my cousin cut from the shank of cured ham.
I started photographing my food several years ago. At the time I can’t say I recall having any plan to begin writing about the food. But food is integral to our experiences and photographing the food I ate helped preserve memories just as a photograph of a person or a place.
There is very little I won’t try eating. Mostly I enjoy the food I have experimented with, except bubble-tea which is disgusting.
This is a little gingerbread man my mother baked and decorated as a representation of me. Yes, I ate him.
