You’re going to live to what? 80? Let’s say 4 meals a day (more on this later) for 365 days a year for 80 years: Over 116,000 meals in your lifetime.

Wouldn’t you want those meals to be made of the good stuff? Or at least made by someone who cares about what you eat? After all, what you eat ultimately determines a lot about you: your health, your energy level, your body composition, your perception of self, your confidence, your success.  It’s third to breathing and drinking; I’d say that’s pretty important.

And yet most people take food and eating for granted (most people being those that can afford to be reading this on the Internets). They let others decide what goes in their bellies: restaurants, fast food joints, grocery stores, President’s Choice, Tim Hortons. I know because I was one of them.

When I was pushing the limits of my 40″ loose fit Old Navy jeans, I knew I had to do something. A cross country move had laid waste to my waistline; I was house poor so I couldn’t afford to throw money around on fancy high tech food. So right after Thanksgiving 2007, I started cooking our dinners.

I planned the menu, cooked the meals and discovered along the way that I like this stuff. Cooking is fun. It’s the same type of challenge of all the other things I enjoy, like weight lifting and programming: there are lots of details to master, extraordinary breadth and depth so you’re likely to not get bored.

Cooking your own meals is enormously rewarding too: it’s the cheapest way to eat; it changes your taste and appreciation for food, because you know what went in the meal; it’s empowering; it’s a great way to lose weight and a great way to show off. There is a great small pleasure in serving a dish that you cooked and the only sound afterwards is the clinking of forks on plates.

So what’s this blog going to be? I haven’t entirely figured out that yet, but it’ll be part how-to, part science lesson, part history lesson, part chronicle of meals and part recipe book. About the various aspects of food, as if food, the topic, were a thing to pick up, turn over, pull apart and put back together. All through the voice of a pedantic, contrary nerd.

It’s about me.

It’s about cooking.

It’s about food.