I was not raised in a family of cooks. My parents grew up in the Midwest, in the second half of the last century, during a period in which a great deal of culinary knowledge was lost. Our signature meals came out of cardboard or cellophane or, most often, some combination of the two. My dad who, for the region, is something of an epicure, loved to “spice up” boxed holiday stuffing by tossing it with lightly sautéed onions and peppers. My mom took many a weekday dinner out of the chest freezer in the basement.

My first experience of what I would think of as “good food” — when I was around 10 years old — was a bacon blue cheese burger. The details of time and place are lost to me, but I still remember the euphoria of that first bite. I was transported, caught in a delirious tide of new textures and bright, tangy umami flavors, and I was determined to return. Though I could not tell the difference between cilantro and thyme (all small green things were interchangeable to me) and wasn’t familiar with any stovetop setting other than “high,” I spent many prepubescent hours in the kitchen attempting to recreate recipes from Alton Brown, Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis. I loved the way the chefs spoke about unfamiliar places. I loved how they whisked me to a world where it mattered how you cut an onion.

My pursuit of culinary knowledge became an escape from the mundane, the provincial, the working class. Tossing a soft-boiled egg and nori into a bowl of rehydrated noodles, I could forget that I’d never had ramen that didn’t come out of a 30-cent packet. Pulling together a budget imitation of savory, ricotta-filled crepes, I could pretend the real thing wasn’t more than an hour outside of town. Cooking was freedom from poverty and suburban boredom.

To the degree that it existed, my parents’ culinary snobbery manifested in taking extra care with one Midwestern staple: potatoes. My mom was raised on instant mashed potatoes and loathed them. Her small protest against the product was an overflowing bowl of russet potatoes next to the stove, which I don’t recall ever being empty in more than 18 years of cohabitation with her. And while my dad was happy to serve us frozen pizza, his face would twist with revulsion in the face of dried, flaky bits of tuber. Their disavowal of what was once a family staple instilled in me the realization that sometimes, something better to eat waited on the other side.

My parents split when I was young; I don’t really remember the time they were together. My mom and dad’s new partners, both kind, gentle, generous men, brought their own culinary flair to the family; respectively, pot roast braised with off-brand Coca-Cola and tater tot casserole. Together, my parents, my brother and I remained a take-and-bake household, a Lean Cuisine household, a Hot Pocket household. We were not people who took joy in the preparation or consumption of food.

My brother and I spent our youth shuttling along the western edge of Lake Michigan between our mom and my stepdad in Green Bay, Wis., and our dad and his partner, who were forever moving from house to house somewhere along the edge of Chicagoland. I felt most alive during our rare weekends there, spent draped in cosmopolitan anonymity. Watching people lounge at the downtown beaches and casually dine at upscale restaurants, I saw a fantasy of my adult life play out in front of me. Like the chefs on Food Network, the people who lived in Chicago knew of the world and its wonders. I wanted to be the sort of person who had a passport, who could hold a conversation in another language. I wanted extraordinary, I wanted grand, and I was convinced they existed only somewhere else.