Today marks the end of my 12 week internship at America’s Test Kitchen. As discussed in my last post, I’ve had a good experience at ATK over these last few months, feeling like I’ve taken some real steps towards becoming a better cook. Coming off of my short lived ‘restaurant experiment’, it was really interesting to see firsthand that there are opportunities available for people that like to cook and write while keeping to the ’9-5′ schedule that I am a bit more accustomed to. Knowing from the very beginning that this internship would only last so long, lately I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and research to determine the next steps for me. As I’m slowly learning, even when you’re an adult, it can be hard to figure out what to do when one grows up. While I haven’t found any easy or immediate answers or solutions to this great mystery, I do have some exciting news to share.
At the end of the month, the wife and I will begin to slowly make our way back to the West coast, setting our eventual sights on the San Francisco Bay Area. In some ways, this move has always been in the cards for us. With the wife finishing business school in May and me finishing my culinary school training in March, besides my internship, there hasn’t been much to keep us tied to Boston. Not to say that living here hasn’t been an interesting experience for us, but we just never really felt bonded with the city in the same way that we always (and not so secretly) longed to be back West. I am thrilled to be heading back to the San Francisco Bay Area, a place that I called home on-and-off from 2001 – 2008, with a new focus on finding ‘my way’ in the world of food. With year-round access to a smorgasbord of incredibly fresh produce, a budding food cart/truck scene, lots of incredible restaurants, plus all sorts of other cool things, like the Underground Farmer’s Market, there will be countless opportunities for me to immerse myself in a thriving food scene.
The wife and I are in the midst of putting our lives into cardboard boxes as we prepare to vacate our Somerville apartment in less than a week. Beginning on July 6th, after spending nearly a week in New Jersey visiting with my family, we will be hitting the road for a two-week cross country adventure. Never one to turn down an opportunity to take an extended road trip and see something new in this great country of ours, this will be my fourth such journey. From NJ, we will be working our way south along the Eastern seaboard, with stopovers in Nags Head, NC (the Outer Banks), Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. From there we will head west towards New Orleans and Austin. We’re still working on the itinerary for the rest of our trip but as of now we are looking at heading to Alomogordo, NM (home of the White Sands National Monument) and Santa Fe, NM. We’ll probably head into Utah after that to check out Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon and Bryce Canyon, then we’ll head across central Nevada via US 50 (aka ‘the loneliest road in America’) before spending a night in Lake Tahoe, crossing into California somewhere around July 21st or 22nd. Our trip details may change but our commitment to eat as much as we possibly can and document our entire experience will not. If all goes according to plan, I will be posting frequent updates from the road.
