Rafe

I have always been interested in cooking, even as a small child. This was encouraged by my mother, who is an excellent and prolific cook. I grew up in an academic environment where I was exposed to a variety of ethnic foods, especially Cuban and Vietnamese, in addition to the style of cooking I was accustomed to at home, which would best be described as German centered American eclectic. Later, after I graduated college, I began to be interested in cooking more for myself in a creative capacity, not only attempting to reproduce my mothers dishes, but some of the more interesting cuisines that I had become aware of in the interim, these being Indian (Northern, mostly), Korean, and more recently Moroccan. I have a fair number of cookbooks, for a beginner, at least, but my attempts to produce fried chicken have rather graphically pointed out that there is much more than a list of ingredients and methods to cooking. Experience is required. While my mother has been most helpful with the dishes that she is expert in, and we have been creating a "family cookbook" together, as a way to preserve family recipes, she cannot help me with the dishes she is unfamiliar with. That is why I came here, to attempt to gain the help of the collective wisdom of the group on those sorts of things that books can't tell you.

I still can't approximate my mothers fried chicken.