Week 1

For my senior project, I chose to work with four of my friends on a cooking/food critiquing project. The reason that I wanted to do this type of project was that since the pandemic and quarantine, food became a huge part of my life. My whole family was already big fans of different types of food, but it just felt more prominent at the beginning of quarantine. I wanted to try new restaurants that were specific to Portland that I had not tried before. I also didn't do as much cooking as I would have wanted during quarantine, so I saw this as a good opportunity to have that aspect as well. The reason I wanted to also do critiquing specifically was that I thought this would make trying the food a little more unique. I would be able to give my opinion on the food and compare the dishes together. It was just a different aspect of the food industry that I didn't know much about.

The people I'm working with for this project are Grant Underwood, Kai Gamboa, and Rishi Alluri. We all thought of the idea together and we all just wanted to learn a bit more about the food industry/business in Portland. There are so many good local Portland restaurants and we really wanted to acknowledge that and learn more about them. The way that we constructed our project was by making a spreadsheet that would be our schedule for the four weeks. We decided that each week we were going to do a different type of food from four different countries. But as we thought about it more, we thought it would be better to broaden the choices of food we could do. So instead of Italian and Japanese, we chose Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. We also made sure to have days in our schedule for cooking and writing.

Finally, the 3 goals that we made for our project are simply to improve my abilities in the kitchen and cooking different types of food, to understand the food culture and industry in Portland better, and to form a better understanding of how food critiquing works on a professional and known professional level.

Pictures from our week: