Maslow's Heirarchy of Goals - part 1

hey guys - thanks for reading, subscribing, and giving me feedback on my first post. i’m not a great writer, but I think I’ll start to improve. please tell me more of what you want & don’t want to see.

a bit of an update, I have some more 2025 goals, and these are different, more personal (some would say physiological) goals: I want to learn more dishes that I personally love. I think of myself as a semi foodie - anything that’s relatively easy / low effort for me to try, I will try. why not? a hype pizza slice - some well reviewed tacos - paella - etcetera. trying cuisine from all parts of the world is an easy way to try the history of different cultures and see what foods have been ate for thousands of years. on history - check out the next section.

culinary roots

if we’ve hung out, you know I like to look up things and find out the history of them. you might think history on wikipedia is strictly limited to people, places, and countries. why not food as well? and even the most basic building blocks, like fruits, veggies, and etc? one of my memories in elementary school is learning about thanksgiving and how the natives showed the pilgrims corn, so in my mind, I obviously know corn is from the Americas. what about everything else? are apples really Johnny Appleseed’s thing & is this american, or where the hell is it from? you’ll find out soon.

my grandpa and I were in Istanbul and sitting down waiting for our family to come back, when we decided to talk about fruits. we asked ourselves - where is the apple from? (now that I’m writing this here, it’s such a quirky link between us that seems awfully clear to everyone else, but wasn’t super clear to me. we share 33% DNA - the most of any of my grandparents… makes you wonder) in typical chev fashion, we decided to look it up. where did the apple originate on this planet?

we guessed somewhere in Europe. this made sense, no? it turns out - it’s from the mountains near China and Kazakhstan. you wouldn’t have guessed it from the Johnny Appleseed propaganda they fed you.

and it turns out… you wouldn’t guess where half the fruits you generally eat are from. did you know bananas were, volumetrically, sometimes mostly seeds until they were domesticated? and oranges aren’t from Florida? (hint: the orange’s smaller cousin has the name of a language the original country speaks) it was pretty cool to look all this up. I won’t spoil the birth countries of all these fruits, but I will say, I was shocked to learn that basically the only fruit that I eat on a regular basis that is actually from the United States is… the BLUEBERRY.

now, after you learn about the main building blocks, I moved onto the next step - buildings, skyscrapers, monuments, museums even - recipes. how old were some of the things I was eating? who made this? what led to this? again I won’t spoil much of it, but if you’re like me, you’d associate pizza with the ancient people of mount Vesuvius or something - eating a nice Margherita while it caked you in ash. think again. the margherita as we know it was invented around 1889, which means that the light bulb was invented prior to the modern day pizza. isn’t that crazy to think about? and why is that?

the answer is kinda simple really - it goes back to the whole foods - the tomato isn’t actually European - it’s American (southern to be exact). can you believe that? All of these things that I thought were ancient, ancient recipes, like pizza, lasagna bolognese, aren’t any more ancient than the conquistadors killing 90% of the Indians and taking all their good food.

And do you know when I decided to look up the tomato on wiki? I was sitting in an airport lounge in England, eating roasted tomatoes for breakfast. My colonized mind was going fucking crazy. Learning this felt like my 32% Native American blood (23&Me) was looking down at me in shame.

Anyways - back to my 2025 goals.

onto cooking

background - I have never been good at cooking. this started to change in 2020 though - during covid, I randomly decided to want to have some baklava; did I know how to make it? have I ever made anything from any similar cuisine? not really… my old roommate had taught me how to make greek salad, which is just dicing up a couple of things, adding some spices, and adding some oil. but to be honest, in my mind, cooking isn’t really much different than just those basics. maybe I’m just ignorant. who knows.

I looked up the recipe, licked the stamp, and sent it - and it comes out pretty decent. Now I make it every year for Christmas. Pao and I make a lasagna for Thanksgiving usually, I make Pao carbonara pretty regularly, and I even made spicy tuna with rice for our ski crew last year. yes, those links are the recipes I use

to me, since recipes are really just architectural styles based on different building materials, my personal architectural style doesn’t really have much synergy; Brutalist, Neo Gothic, Art Deco. I’m trying to add some Valencian next - both the Venezuelan and Spanish versions. My next two dishes that I want to get pretty good at are Paella & Arepas. Arepa Lady, our favorite Arepas on this earth, closed, and now it is up to me to become an arepa maker. Paella has always been something I’ve loved & well, I’ll try to make a good one for you, my reader, if we hang out in NYC.

thanks for reading this post - let me know if you want a notification when a new blog post drops (there’s a link on the blog for that now), if you have any comments or suggestions, or if you want to see my mediocre culinary creations.