I discover food blogs, obsess a little, and wonder if perhaps this is nothing to be ashamed of

I called my grandmother this morning. She was really really sick over the past few weeks and it's a huge relief to hear her sounding happy and cheerful, and to know that she can go out for walks again. I told her that I made waffles for breakfast. Her reply? Oh that's wonderful. But you know, those things are too tasty, you have to watch yourself. I laughed it off, but that's the typical response I get from my grandma and my mom about various new endeavors I've attempted. Like when, about a month ago, I told my mom that I got worms for composting and she told me that I have a very patient husband, and that I should keep him away from other women so that he doesn't try to compare me to anyone else.

Anyway, so I think that these kinds of comments from my family have kept from truly getting into something. And to an extent, they still do.

But this last summer things were a little different. First of all, I'm older and wiser now, and have a husband who doesn't believe in the idea of moderation. Second, I lost weight in China (I'm not sure why, but I think that swimming a lot spring quarter had a lot to do with it. I never lose weight when I start swimming, but I do tend to lose weight when I stop swimming. This has happened to me only twice now, so this isn't too scientific a conclusion). I think I only lost about 5 pounds, but it was enough to make me feel better about my body. Furthermore, the fact that I could lost weight while eating tasty food made me thing about quality vs quantity of food. We always had a large amount of food in our house--I think this had to do with the excitement of having access to massive quantities of food that ex-soviets necessarily experience--and no one in my family has particularly good eating habits. So while we're all pretty healthy and not obese, we don't exactly have slim bodies at all. And this made me very very self-conscious all through high school, and through some of college. Anyway, having visited China made me think about how we view food; maybe it's better to spend more money on a small quantity of a really tasty thing, eat it, enjoy it, and then stop eating it. It helped that I came back to a summer with no research to do, and no real plans other than moving to San Francisco. So I read about food (and also investigated composting). Then we went to San Diego, and oh boy was that a lifechanging trip for me. First, I was on my own for a large part of the time. Second, I wasn't really counting dollars. So in terms of what we ate and what we did, the point was to maximize enjoyment, not necessarily get the most for our dollar. I tasted a mojito, I had spanish food, I truly enjoyed a shakespeare play for the first time in ages. This was all very sensual and very epicurean andd very nice, and a very welcome change from college.

In particular, at this lovely Indian Restaurant called Monsoon, in the Gaslamp district, I tried saag. Which is something I've tried before many times. It's basically Indian creamed spinach. But this time, I returned to my shiny new apartment in San Francisco and thought, hmm, I should find a recipe and learn how to make saag. And so after a google search, I found a recipe on a lovely food blog and then I learned what a food blog was. Oh my! People obsessively writing about food. My mother would never approve, or rather, my mother would never judge this to be a valuable use of time. And yet, how appealing. I read a read some more. I learned that mojitos require a lot of love from bartenders. I still haven't made one, but when I decide to try I know that I'll have lots of help from the internets.

I think the point of all this is that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and reading about things that my mother would never think to do. My mom says that she is not very domashnaya--she doesn't stay at home and tend to her household, because she has bigger and better and more exciting things to do like ski and climb rocks and hang out with uber-cool 20-something year olds (who are now 30-something year olds) from poxod.com. And while my mom actually does cook very tasty food very well, and has a deceptively impressive garden and beautiful (and reasonably clean) house, all this stuff that she does around this house was always done as somewhat of an afterthought, at least in my view. And so I never learned how to do certain things because I felt like it would be shameful to think about them. But I don't feel so bad about my interests in cooking and composting and gardening now. Cause I'm a grad student now, I have no children, and so no matter what I do I won't be my mom. So I guess I can just be happy being me.