Hello and welcome to weirdcombinations.com; the blog dedicated to food, wine, culture but mostly to fun.  This site has been a long time in coming.  It arose out of our sense of disconnect, bewilderment and frank despair about our modern food culture as viewed in the media.

Have you ever wondered about celebrity chefs on TV or magazines?  Their food almost invariably looks amazing, but do they ever actually prep and make it themselves? Do they ever really eat the final product?  Does it taste good?  Are the pictures in magazines and cookbooks representative of what you could actually make at home if you followed the recipe step-by-step?  Would you really want to be on the tasting panel of a chef cook-off show and try all of the schlock that they throw together in an hour or two?  Does extreme eating really mean good eating?  If you replaced one celebrity chef with another, would the food look and more importantly taste the same?  These and zillions of other nagging questions were the seeds that led to the origin of this site.

stevie and hegui feeling down over bad food

Here we do not pretend to be professional chefs or writers.  Rather our contributors are dedicated amateurs who want to eat, drink and live better.  We trot out recipes that we’ve actually tried.  We show what they really look like after we make them. Avid fans of wine and drink, we taste-test wines, tour vineyards and offer our frank and sometimes inebriated impressions.  We talk of our food shopping habits and biases as well as our ideas about dining out.  Here we tell you our opinions and advice; sometimes practical, sometimes off-beat, spurious or even silly.  We try to take a personal point of view with all of our writing.  That means that we do not recommend that you try anything that we make in the hope that it turns out the same as ours.  What’s the point of that?  We always recommend that you mix things up.  Keep an open mind but don’t believe us until you’ve done it yourself, perhaps a few different ways.  Try changing ingredients, flavors, courses and restaurants to discover who you really are as a cook, an eater, as a unique individual.

Our goal is to bring the enjoyment back to our daily food experiences.  Whether that means a five course meal with a dozen friends, having a drink at a local coffee house, dining on an intercontential jet headed for Asia or standing by the kitchen sink gobbling down last night’s leftovers, we hunt for the pleasure and the humor in every day.  Like actively living well, this is a work in progress. We expect that we will contradict ourselves, change our minds and disagree with one-another.  You probably will too.  We genuinely appreciate your feedback, advice, suggestions and most importantly your individual experiences of life with food and drink.  Salut!  Enjoy!

One note of warning: a few of us are pescetarian: vegetarians that eat fish.  This does not mean that we are radical, Northern Californian food crazies.  Rather we have just made a choice about eating.  And that’s the whole point of weirdcombinations, after all, trying to make meaningful choices about our lives.  That said, we do not ignore or make judgments about meat, poultry and other “land animals.”  Generally we simply leave it to you, our readers, to address these.  The one exception to this rule is the site category: meat.  This is a compromise for those of the weirdcombos crew that desperately want to comment on topics not covered elsewhere in the site: be these meats in the traditional sense, popular culture, travel or whatever floats our boat at the time.