I love food.  I love eating great, tasty, well-prepared food.  I watch No Reservations, I’ve read Kitchen Confidential, The Nasty Bits, and Heat (and if that book doesn’t make you appreciate Italian food, nothing will).  I love exploring new cuisines, but I also love the classics.  One of my favorite dishes is a well-made plate of tagliatelle Bolognese.  My stomach is grumbling just thinking about it.

However, one of the unfortunate drawbacks of moving to Indiana, especially rural Indiana, is the decided lack of cuisine.  In the town of Warsaw, not counting the Chain restaurants, there aren’t many choices.  Most of the 8 or so non-chain restaurants are “classic American.”  There is a brew pub, which has halfway decent beer, but over-salts the food.  There’s a “New American” restaurant, which is by and large OK, but hasn’t figured out whether it’s Asian Fusion or New American (sushi menu, bento boxes, cous cous, and tapas?).  There’s an island themed restaurant that does sushi and island seafood, plus pasta.  And then there are four really bad Chinese restaurants (I won’t fault them for being bad, they’re just catering to the Indiana palate for Chinese food).   The one decent cuisine they have here is Mexican.  They have a phenomenal little lunch counter in one of the grocery stores that makes great tortas and even has lengua and cabeza de res. However, what blows my mind is there isn’t a single Italian restaurant around.

Given all of this, you’d think I’d start to resemble Cartman.  However, the irony is that I’m probably eating healthier than I ever have.  Part of it is that I’m on a pretty strict diet right now.  But the other part of it is that C and I have made a conscious effort to buy organic, locally produced food.  It helps there’s a large Amish community close by that is always willing to provide fresh, chemical-free food.  The thing about this food is that it’s actually much more flavorful and easier to make good meals with.  I guess Gordon Ramsey is right: Local, fresh ingredients always make a difference.

The other upside of being here in Indiana is that I feel as if my cooking skills are getting better.  I am by no means a chef extraordinaire, but I do feel like I’m getting the hang of this cooking thing, to the point where I can start developing my own recipes and dishes.  It’s actually a lot of fun to pull together a dish that tastes good when you’re finished with it.  I can now understand that cooking has a lot to do with experience – what works, what doesn’t work – it’s all stored in a culinary memory that allows you to pull things together when you need to.  I’m sure no one’s ever made the analogy that cooking is like chess, but in some senses, it is.  Great chess players have the memory of thousands of games and situations to rely on when they play chess.  I imagine that great chefs have thousands of dishes that they remember and pull together to make a wonderful dish.  It’s a bit of a stretch, I know, but I’m a geek.

I do still miss going out to dinner, though.  As much as I enjoy putting something together myself, I believe that sampling other people’s creations and ideas are necessary to keep things exciting.  At the end of the day, I think that’s one of the biggest things I’ll miss about being near a city.  I used to think that I’d miss the cultural events the most – shows, art, etc., and I do miss those.  But surprisingly, I’ve found myself missing the ability to try a new restaurant more than anything else.  Unfortunately, there’s no remedy for that in a small town.

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