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| In Laguardia, Spain |
We are Nick and Danielle
Leahy, a young married couple from Atlanta, who recently quit our jobs, sold
all that we owned, left home to travel the world for a while, and eventually
settle abroad in London. Now, we will each write a little about the other.
On Nick
Nick is a chef.
Actually, the world's greatest chef if you ask me, and this coming from someone who
is a regular beneficiary of his skills. His greatest strength is that he
can cook anything you would like, from sushi to curry, from bouillabaisse to
frogs legs (though I don't request those too often), and cook it well.
I attribute this to two factors:
1)He was born to be a chef,
and it is as simple as that. His profession is truly his calling and this
fact is so evident each morning when he wakes up and immediately heads for the
kitchen to start cooking (sometimes I am not quite sure if he is even fully
awake!).
2)He's a voracious reader
particularly on the subject of food, including the history of, its'
preparation, and cultural differences, and therefore knows more than just the
technique behind a food, but also the "why" of it. This may not
seem like an important trait, but in the predominately seedy world of
restaurants, most chefs are busy dividing their time between the kitchen and
the bottle. Nick's passion and devotion to cooking goes so much further
than the kitchen, and it shows in every dish.
To know Nick, is to know that
he will eat absolutely anything (although he is slightly obsessed with pork)
and then he will want to discuss it...in detail. He gets more excited
over local produce markets than national monuments, putters around in his head
a lot (I just assume he is thinking of new recipes), and most importantly (and
very simply) just loves to eat. He is a loving husband, great friend, and a fantastic person to dine with.
On Danielle
Danielle always complains
that she lacks an easily identifiable identity (such as, Nick is a chef), to
which I always reply "it's a good thing to be a deep and complex enough
person to not be defined by just one word". She is, all at once,
sweet and shy, and hard-nosed and assertive. She is aggressively
entrepreneurial and self-confident, yet is sometimes maddeningly in-need of
reassurance. She drives me crazy and keeps me sane. She loves
chocolate, dogs, and dancing in kitchens, and hates....very little (I think the
only thing she actually hates might be cumin, but I am working on that
one). She has been an event coordinator, a marketing head, a director of
operations, a general manager, a waitress, and a retail manager. I say
this to mean that no matter what she puts her mind to, she succeeds at.
She is a photographer by training, a multi-talented artist by passion, and
possesses a sharp mind for business that the two types mentioned earlier in this sentence usually lack. In short, I may be easily defined as a
"chef", but I don't think there is ONE word that could do the same
for my wife.
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| We all arrive in Ireland (dogs, too!) |
We will probably refer to
each other by our nicknames more often than not, which are respectively
Mort(me) and Noods(her). The story of these is actually quite
simple. She kept calling me a "silly bologna," (a phrase she is still insisting actually exists) which as a
chef I had to object to, since bologna is the world's worst meat. I said, at
least call me mortadella, which is a good Italian version of it, and it stuck. It stuck so much in
fact that I have even heard my own father refer to me as Mort. As for
Noods, she just gets struck by odd moods, which cause her to dance like a
toddler in the kitchen, crave popsicles, ask obscure questions, and in many
other ways, act "noodley", which I simply shortened to Noods.
We created Caperz to express Nick's love of food, and Danielle's love of travel. The word "caper" is a salty delicious little food, as well as, an adventure, such as a world tour or a bank robbery (only one of the two planned so far). We thought it fit. Also, featured in Caperz is Herman, the traveling plastic orangutan who was born a potato peeler in Ireland and has since broken free of the kitchen to hike the Kenyan outbacks, climb St. Peter's Basilica, walk the Royal Road in Warsaw, and much more (see link on homepage).
