Though I have never sought professional help, I have been told I can be obsessive-compulsive about certain things. More than one friend has called me fickle, fussy and opinionated.

A couple of weeks ago, I was told, to my great joy, that I would be this newspaper's next restaurant critic. I see a certain synergy working here.

Since I will be spending much of December dining out and getting up to speed until my first review is published Jan. 4, allow me to introduce myself.

For me, this is a dream job. I love food -- the history, the science, the endless combinations of ingredients and creative possibilities, the many cultural implications of food as a way of being and all the people involved in the process from farm to plate.

In many ways, what we eat says something about who we are -- or who we want to be.

I'm an avid cyclist and a scratch golfer, and I enjoy nothing more than the time I spend with my three dogs and two cats.

I also love to cook and bake. It is a large part of who I have become. I find it stimulating, inspiring, rewarding and, yes, humbling.

A two-day effort to bake the perfect sourdough loaf can fall short because of a change in humidity, because my starter wasn't refreshed in time or because the baker (me) lost patience and rushed a step.

A perfect loaf -- with a crust that is crisp and blistered and just the right color, that crackles when sliced or torn, can make me feel triumphant. It is something simple and real, like pulling a ripe tomato off the vine, feeling its heft in my hand and heading toward the kitchen to get a knife.

I don't need the timer on my oven to tell me a cake is ready. The cake announces itself with an aroma that appears suddenly. It's a whiff of new energy in the air that could mean nothing else, just as the aroma of something burned is final and irreversible and disheartening.

By no means was I born to be a restaurant critic. My otherwise wonderful stay-at-home mother was an unenthusiastic cook in a household that consumed roughly three variations of meat and potatoes -- the variable being corn, carrots or peas -- on a schedule that lasted until her divorce after 23 years. That's when she dumped the meatloaf.

Chicken was always Shake 'N Bake, cakes were two-step mixes from a box, pudding instant, pie frozen. My mom never met a piece of meat she couldn't obliterate through overcooking.

My dad? Worse. Once, when I was 5, he decided he would play the role of master chef one Saturday morning and cook Western omelets. My brothers and sister picked at theirs until the chef was red-faced with insult. They were sent to their rooms.

Dad said that anyone who finished it would get a special trip to the bakery for lemon meringue pie. Rising to the challenge, I mustered the courage to down those darn eggs and was rewarded with the first and last lemon meringue pie I have ever had. The experience was so unsettling, the pie's taste so closely linked to that dreadful meal, that the mere mention of "meringue," to this day, renders me slightly woozy.

Needless to say, my three siblings and I were fussy eaters.

In college, far from home, I was humiliated if a roommate would invite me to his family's home for dinner and I had to contend with broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, turnips, etc. I decided right then to devote myself to trying new foods.

In no time, I was cooking them, too. Imagine my surprise when I learned that pancake batter from scratch -- with buttermilk and eggs, flour, baking soda and a tablespoon or two of sugar -- took about 90 seconds longer to prepare and tasted a hundred times better than the stuff out of the box.

To this day, my two brothers and sister haven't changed. My well-traveled younger brother with the prestigious MBA takes a jar of peanut butter to France, of all places, so he can survive without having to eat French food.

I have a lot of admiration for chefs and servers and all those who make the dining experience a delight, often under the pressures of time and economics.