The Glorious Formation of the Culinary Conquistadors

Once upon a time in a magical land called Auburn, two brothers stared blankly into an overfull and somewhat grungy-looking refrigerator.

"This sucks," the older of the two stated bluntly.

"Well you know what they say," replied the other.

"Not really. What's that?"

"In order to clean something, you have to get something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else necessarily getting clean."

"Oh... What does that have anything to do with us cleaning out the refrigerator?"

The younger shrugged.

"You're right," the elder brother replied.

And so started what promised to be an arduous Sunday afternoon peregrination into a world of strange, slimy funk, blocks of cheese playing host to a metropolis of mold, and, oddly enough, a food-related revelation.

The two brothers, Mattias (Matty) Treu and his older brother Lukas (Luke) had realized upon Luke's return from the grocery story that it was about that time of year again... the time where enough food had been lost in the crevasses and dark places of the refrigerator that it was getting both difficult to store food and, well, gross to imagine what lurked just out of sight. As they started, Luke shared a bit of his newest lunch creation with Matty - an oven baked flatbread with roasted, olive oil-marinated tomatoes, strips of genoa salami straight from the deli, a few chunks of fresh mozzarella, some basil, and a dash of both sea salt and ground pepper. It was, as one may imagine, both pleasing to the eye and the palate.

"That... that's really good," Matty stated as his eyes lit up.

"Yeah... I dunno was just trying to think of some interesting stuff to cook while at the store. You know, just different stuff. Doesn't have to be hard. Just shake stuff up... with the right ingredients you can make some pretty cool stuff," Luke replied.

"Yeah... I'd be into that. We should make some exotic stuff... I bet it's easier than people think... and will be much more appealing once this *pointing at the refrigerator* is cleaned up."

"We should... we have the stuff. We could write about it or something."

"Like how?"

"I dunno, a blog or something... I haven't made one before but I bet we could. We could like, cook some cool stuff a few times a week, look up recipes in books or online, talk about finding the right ingredients, relay the recipes, and talk about our experiences... How hard it is to cook, what it was like for normal, non-experienced people, how it tasted, whether it was worth it, stuff like that. It could be fun... and even if something didn't work out right it may be worth it just to read for laughs..."

"Hmmm... we could be....... CULINARY CONQUISTADORS!" Matty thrust an invisible fork toward the threatening puddle of sludge at the bottom of the fridge. "It sounds like work, but it could be pretty fun and humorous. Heck, we ain't got jobs."

"You're right."

"You took a cooking course, right?"

"Uh... yeah, sorta. Austrian Cuisine when I was studying in Salzburg."

"That's vaguely applicable."

"Vaguely."

"Awesome."

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And that is how this blog came to be. Whether it will be vastly successful, wholly neglected, or passingly unimportant we cannot say, but we'll be whippin' up some strange and (with any luck) delicious dishes one way or the other. We're two slightly inept brothers with a lot of time on our hands and little "foodie" experience. We're culinary conquistadors.


Food, I hope you're ready.