Cris Concepcion - Bio
The first year that I lived on my own was when I was eighteen — senior year of high school, my parents moved to another country and I stuck around to graduate. I spent that year eating takeout pizza, Subway sandwiches and Hungry-Man frozen dinners.
It. Sucked.
Afterwards, after I went off to college and got my own apartment, my mom gave me three recipes: how to roast a chicken, how to make a stock from the carcass, and how to make a chicken and rice soup with the leftovers from the first recipe. Everything else, I’ve had to learn; and a part of me is driven to cook by the psychological scars of that first year of takeout and frozen meals. If the current library is any measure, those scars run deep. Or maybe they don’t and I just love to cook now; but it makes for a more interesting story to tell it the other way.
It also explains why, whenever I size up a new cookbook, I tend to skip to their stock and roast chicken recipes. You can tell a lot from a cook by the way they roast their chicken. Unless they’re vegetarians, of course. In which case, nevermind.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never eaten a Hungry-Man dinner since that first cursed year. And I’ll encourage you not to walk that path yourself.
If you want a more general account of my life, feel free to browse my livejournal.
