Lisa

"Are you hungry?," my grandmother would ask, as she came upon me curled up on the couch reading one of the few cookbooks in my childhood home titled "1000 Casseroles". Maybe that sounds scary but it did inform me that there were many types of food besides New England home cooking.

I still love to read cookbooks and own hundreds. As a very young wife and stay at home mother I cooked and read my way through cuisines and over continents. Travel to Europe, Africa and around the US allowed me to indulge my other passion: shopping in specialty food stores, ethnic shops and open markets. My sisters and I have a passion for "urban hunting and gathering"; while other women are shopping for clothes we bring home pastries and sausages from Boston's North End, or urfa pepper and fresh olives from Middle Eastern markets in Montreal. My daughter and I visit olive orchards, farmstead cheese makers and fish markets in and around her hometown, San Francisco.

A gift from my husband to attend a week long course in Ingredients and Flavor Dynamics at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, CA, was life changing. I came home, cleaned my kitchen, threw out my spices and started anew. A month later I applied for a job at WFM, which was ten years and a lifetime ago.

There is no cuisine I don't enjoy and each one has its home style dishes. I have brought to the Market a desire to maintain simplicity while continuing to explore techniques and flavors which expand our ideas about what we consider familiar and comforting food.

As that eight year old reading about Spanish rice I'm sure that simple little cookbook was describing a dish with tomatoes, green peppers, onions and maybe a little garlic salt. Today I might make a Catalan rice dish with better informed ingredients and spices but the seed planted so long ago was that food was worth the exploration, and I've spent my life doing just that.