Sirs, I think you need a second opinion.

Fellow conquistadors! Friends! Guy who carries the cooking gear through the foodie jungle! Yes, you too, Mom!

I have an exciting announcement. The Culinary Conquistador crew is to be expanded! No, I don't mean a special guest star (though we'll surely have more of those): Pat Deering, one of our most... colorful friends (cool it folks, not that sort of colorful)... Has come up with a, in my opinion, sweet idea. He wants to take the Conquistador recipes and actually test them out!

SCIENCE!!!!!

Hang onto your lab coats boys and girls, Deering plans not only to see if our recipes can be reproduced, but to check their edibilty himself. He will be creating the same dishes we've featured in the past according to our instructions and will be sharing them with new people in new places. He is clearly putting these carefully controlled variables in place for the good of all, helping to investigate whether our concoctions are legit. It's definitely not because he's on a college campus and has spare time on his hands and lots of mooching friends. Definitely not.

Whatever the case, we're excited for a few reasons. First, more authors means more content. Deering is a funny guy with the ability to add a wacky twist on everyday life, so it'll be fun. Additionally, Deering is a good cook. If you go back to the Summer 09 archives, he was a guest once or twice. He has worked in nice restaurants, knows a lot more about cooking than we do, and is full of insightful tricks. Finally, we're excited because we'll learn along the way and will remain motivated to stay on top of the blog as well.

All around, this should be fun. This weekend Matty and I will be making goulash; who's to say what Deering will do? Stay tuned!

New Year's Resolutions...

... are made with the best of intentions, but often don't last.

This is a fact of life.

Now, with that point stated, I would like to let you all know what my New Year's Resolution of 2010 was! I vowed to resurrect the Conquistadors.... to trigger a phoenix-esque rebirth of this blog and all it stands for! Or would that be Quetzalcoatl-esque? Whatever the case, I want to see this blog flourish.

I have a few reasons.

First and foremost, I'm starting a job tomorrow as a public relations intern with Dix & Eaton downtown in Cleveland. I will be working full-time doing challenging communication work for the first time in my life! The best part? I don't get paid.

Wait, worst part.

Yes indeed, I will be learning the ways of the ever-buzzing socialite... and for this reason I predict an innate need is brewing deep within me to be trendy and creative in all parts of my life. How do I do this? Well, I suppose I could blog (check), tweet a lot (check), work on my writing abilities (check), and think outside the box during mundane daily activities... like cooking. Hmm... sounds like a good excuse to work on this here writin' space.

Secondly, and much simpler to understand, is that I got Je Sais Cuisiner ("I Know How To Cook")... the three generation old French cooking "bible" for Christmas and I have roughly 1,000 pages of reading / cooking to do on that front. Also for my birthday I got "Momofuku", a very complex book by famous chef David Chang featuring lots of interesting, NY restaurant-grade Asian-American fusion cooking. I don't have much of an excuse to NOT cook tbh.

Finally, we spent a week around Christmas in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and trust me, I ate some straaaange food. Much of which I still, to this day, cannot identify due to poor translations along the way. I survived (with mild symptoms), but my eyes were further widened to the wide array of culinary arts around the world and the possibilities rendered by various cultures. I'm into that.

So there are my reasons. The good intentions of the resolution, if you will. Now for the latter part... the "not always working out". See, I am one of two Conquistadors, the other being my rather brilliant (Yale, Harvard, Princeton... they all want him badly, no joke... he's in 11th grade), yet highly lethargic brother, Matty. Matty would lay with a cell phone in one hand and a Nintendo DS in the other all day long if he could, and unfortunately he has academic and extracurricular events regularly that he uses as convenient excuses. If I can't motivate him, this endeavor may be doomed.

That being said, I'm going to try. Hard. The world is full of interesting flavors and associated tomfoolery, and we can certainly spare some of our "wastin' time" generally reserved for inane chatter, videogames, and Youtube videos to tackle said eats. You'll know soon enough if I've been successful. Wish me the best. Hope to post again soon...

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.