Although a lot of people may think the contrary, I believe there is no place that welcomes the food of other countries with more enthusiasm than California. Since I moved here from Brazil more than 20 years ago, I have seeing and experienced an insatiable appetite for international ingredients, foods, and cuisines.

A walk along any neighborhood could offer everything from sushi to tacos and pizza to Korean. Some of this food comes from chain restaurants with global presence, but for the most part it is the product of small restaurants and food shops run by immigrant families that have come here and set up shop. Let me tell you before you are even able to make any assumptions or judgment. This is NOT about politics, walls, laws, or any immigration advocacy. This is FOOD I’m talking about. Food from other cultures and places. It’s the access to these foods and experiences I wholeheartedly celebrate and want to write about today.

California, and especially Los Angeles, is one of those unique places where you can get your hands on a warm, freshly baked roti or stuff your face with Dim Sum in the same area or even in the same street.

Now don’t expect the same in Florence or Madrid. There will be little food available that isn’t local. Certainly, there will be sections of each city with a particular culinary flavor, but there won’t be anything like the concentrated array of nationalities there is in California. No one, it seems to me, has embraced the international cuisines like the Californians.

We, the Californians, are mostly a bunch of adventurous eaters. Our appetites are open-minded, our plates ever happy to hold something unique. We should not be considered snob hippies who eat anything that has a ‘high price tag’ and an ‘Instagram hashtag’, but rather culinary driven people who pick up the best available. To restrict ourselves from predictable food, however good they are, would be to miss out on some delicious eating experience.

Our appetite for international flavors is not confined to restaurants either. We do it at home too.  Our own home cooking of Italian or Thai recipes may not be authentic, but that only proves our willingness to adapt the ideas of others and make them our own- thus ‘fusion California cuisine. This may horrify those who live by “authenticity” but suits most of us  who just want something more extraordinary to eat.

I love us Californians. Call us foodies, vegan snobs, avocado crazies, or else. We don’t care.  We celebrate ingredients, recipes and dishes that have found their way to our table, mostly with those who have moved here from other countries. Each flavor, each ingredient, each fusion, has a story to tell and we love them ALL.

I’ve been down. The more I look at food/cooking blogs out there, melting and sizzling media accounts, minute-videos of how to make the “best dishes ever”, the more I realize I can’t keep up. The fakeness is real! I’ve been self-duped by a bunch of images, videos and endless stories that made me almost believe that I ,too, can make perfectly perfect looking real food.

Sadly, I tried. Luckily, I realize that I’m just too real to be fake.

I’m disappointed. I don’t have as many Instagram followers as I thought I could have. It may be because I fucking suck at pictures, creative #hashtags, catchy post phrases, and who knows what else. I’m an Instalooser and I know it! But I love to cook, and I make good stuff. I’ve been doing it for a long time and for the right reasons.

I have 17 precious blog followers. Seventeen!!! Two of them are my kids. The rest are…not sure who they are because I still can’t figure out how to see who subscribed to this stupidly complicated WordPress blog. Maybe because I’m not tech savvy. Maybe because I don’t do ‘give aways’. Maybe because I can’t write, spell or know how to SEO. But I keep doing it so my kids–and whoever else thinks it’s worth it–can look back at some of these life moments and feel inspired to cook, eat, and share.

In the abstract—which is to say, if I had all the time in the world and I didn’t need to attend to all but those parts of human life I chose to handle myself– the walnuts would be perfectly aligned in the salad, my apron+hair+nails would be impeccable, and my posts would be shining with sparkles.

Unfortunately, I do not live in the abstract, but rather here in reality, where I am sorry to report that a perfectly fake portrait is kind of a pain in the ass to keep up. It requires a special set of behaviors, camera lenses, routines and energies. I cook. My kitchen is messy, my aprons constantly dirty, and my nails…what nails?

Don’t get me wrong here: A well ‘seasoned’ presence is great, and there are so many inspiring food/cooking blogs, vlogs, instas, and stories out there. But I do realize it takes time, money and a pinch of bullshit to make it work–all three I don’t have!

I’ve been down but I’m proud– proud of my cooking, my pictures and writing. I own them all. The successes and the failures. I cook. I share. I document it. It’s sort of my own legacy. It’s messy and unpopular, but it’s REAL!