Gourmet before gourmand

I am a picky eater. I try to hide it these days, and to overcome it by will, particularly in social or public settings, but given my own devices I will have, as I did today, a cheesy potato for lunch, or ramen, or pasta with plain tomato meat sauce. I'm much less picky than when I was a child. I have a running list of foods that I recall rejecting entirely as a kid that I now eat, sometimes with gusto. Tomatoes, pickles, olives, eggs, mushrooms, cheese, and broccoli. Thinking about these foods now makes me wonder how I could ever have not liked them.

I like to cook. I quite consciously chose cooking as a hobby in my first apartment out of college, to control what I ate, rather than cede that control to my roommate, and for the frugality of it, for cooking was a one-two wallet saving punch of keeping my food bills down and my entertainment budget low. I enjoyed cooking before that, but trace my real interest and skill at putting together a tasty dinner for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, to that period just after college.

I would like to think that I've improved as a cook since then. I'm more conscious of the presentation of food, and of balancing a meal between heavy and light, salty and sweet. I'm much more conscious of the origins of my food, the humaneness of the care of the animals who provide my meat, the ways the land on which my food is grown is kept healthy, or not. I have a substantially larger repertoire of dishes than in those first months of cooking dinners on a regular basis, both drawn from my shelves of cookbooks and in the back of my head from repeated experience. I can saute, grill, broil, and char with a blowtorch, make omelettes, get popovers to rise, cut perfect 1/8" cubes of carrot or potato and know when I need to do so (not often), stock a fridge, make chicken stock without getting every pot in the kitchen greasy, and find a ripe peach by its smell. I can host a dinner for 10 (with a little struggle) and have a meal for two or three people, with something for leftovers at work the next day, on the table every night of the week.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: rotibun awesomeness
lunch: misc leftovers
dinner: wonderful french onion soup and beef bourguignon at Le Petite Cafe