Chels eats... gosh, what DO I eat?

I'm Chelsea, and... I eat around. Truth be told, I drink around too.

Let me take a step back.

I was a picky, picky eater as a kid. School lunches were always a struggle because I wouldn't eat sandwiches. My poor mother. I hated tomatoes. Red sauce on pasta was not an option. There was a period of time that I didn't even eat pizza. I mean, what kid doesn't like pizza?! This one didn't. On the other hand, I had fairly... refined taste when it came to the things I did enjoy. When visiting a family member at age 9, when asked what I ate, I casually responded, "Lobster, mostly."

As I got older, I began making conscious choices to try to expand my palate and revisit some of those foods I had sworn off years before. I was tired of being embarrassed when it came to meal times, and realized there was a lot I had to be missing out on. It was a slow process, but I kept at it. I even tried to convince myself that spaghetti would be more delicious with tomato sauce than with butter and salt. No dice. Tomatoes aside, I was getting more adventurous, and food became more exciting. For dinner tonight, I made fresh tomato sauce (no canned sauce for me) and poured it all over some pasta. Then I went back for a little more. And yes, I regained my sanity and pizza is again one of my favorite foods.

In 2005 I moved from the east coast to Denver, CO. Since I had already made some pretty big changes in my life, I figured why stop. As an experiment, I set a goal to give up meat for a month. I wasn't sure I'd make it. Technically I didn't. A couple weeks in, I went to Boston for the weekend. After a long day of baseball, shopping, eating good food, and drinking good wine and cheap beer, I absentmindedly ate a buffalo chicken wing. Whoops.

The month started over. And when it was up, I just kept going. It's not like I rarely ate meat to begin with, so this was no small thing. I had claimed that I could never be vegetarian on more than one occasion. I loved me some bacon and a nice filet mignon. Chicken was a staple. But it just wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Turns out, I can in fact live without bacon! Who knew? The more I thought about meat - where it comes from, how it gets to us, and the impact on the planet, workers, animals, and our bodies along the way - the easier it was to continue not eating it. When I think about it now, I haven't "given up" meat, I have cut it out of my diet. I eat things that I never would have imagined I would try, let alone crave.

There's a but. Having grown up along the coast eating fresh seafood, and having discovered sushi in college, I made a personal concession and didn't count fish as meat. Today I am an ovo-lacto-pescatarian, though my diet is primarily vegetarian. This blog will revisit this often I'm sure, as I try to work out what I am okay with eating. Current plan is to cut out seafood in 2010...

Now that that's covered, why the blog?

I travel for fun and for a living, though a little too little of the former and a little too much of the latter. I never know quite what I will find to eat when on the road. Some weeks I am in fabulous food cities with an abundance of veg options. On other trips, not even the salads are vegetarian. I am constantly on the search for a balance of healthy, tasty, and vegetarian. I'm also a bit of a beer nerd, so finding local craft brews has always been one of my favorite perks of business travel. Back home, it's hard to keep a well stocked fridge with a schedule like mine, and when cooking for one. I dine out pretty frequently, but would like to start putting all those cookbooks in my kitchen to better use, and doing more than just bookmarking great recipes I find online.

I've gotten to the point where posting my thoughts, raves, and rants to a social networking site with a 140 character limit or sending emails to a select few friends about my travel and foodie adventures (and misadventures) just isn't cutting it. I want to join the community of foodie bloggers. That sounds a little weird, and a little cheesy, but for a 20something who works out of her home or a hotel room, I have to find community where I can get it.


So, here goes.