The super subcategories of 'foodie'

I'm not talking today about that person who knows the latest "in" place to eat. Not the one who makes a mean pot roast, either. Nor the one who, at least back in high school, could eat more cheeseburgers than seemed humanly possible.

Today it's time to pay homage to those people who are the true explorers of the dinner table and the backyard grill.

You don't read their cookbooks or watch their cooking shows - these are people in your life, obsessive friends and family who call you up late on a weeknight asking if you remember the scrambled eggs and tortilla chips you ate in Austin, and whether they came with fresh jalapeños or pickled. Who build handmade smokers in their backyard, or reconstitute potato chips and bacon grease into a sauce, or try eight different ways to recreate a pot of braised squid.

They can be many things - and though they could include any of the "notes" with whom I started this whole thing off, they must be more than that. Chewing on this line of inquiry, a few categories come to mind:

There's the collector of food knowledge: I've got one friend whose shelves are lined with cookbooks, ready any time to figure out the various ways to boil an octopus or make black-eyed peas.

There's the protector of tradition: one is my friend's aunt, a New Englander who makes the simplest of baked hams and pot roast and roast beef sandwiches; another is a true Italian grandmother, raised on the Adriatic coast and keeper of the secrets of Ravenna - piadina and crostini and baked cardoons.

Then there's the explorer: I've come across a few, but one stands out far beyond the rest. We didn't bond over food. Those were college days, and the end-of-the-night eating back then usually involved something greasy and fried and, honestly, who really cared (or remembered) how it tasted? Parties and movies and books and music were what mattered then.

But as the years went by, the nonessentials faded away. Food remained.

I remember an early discussion about the allure of grilled cheese that seemed profound at the time, and long before we ever heard of "comfort food." A days-long project to figure out how to slow-barbecue a turkey. This last weekend, it was back to the grill, this time with a wide array of skewered beef.

The experiment? As many different variations of marinades, rubs and spices as the partakers could come up with.

I've been on an on-again, off-again subcontinent binge, so I dug through my cookbooks and came up with something that sounded promising - a Sri Lankan dish with ground coriander and hot peppers, yogurt and lime, garlic and ginger. It had a wonderful yellow color (turmeric), smelled great and tasted ... just OK, as it turned out. Nothing too memorable.

My friend brought out an assortment of rubs to sprinkle on the meat and then grill: thyme and oregano for an herbal Greek taste; cumin and chili powder for a dusty, tingly southwestern feel; a nutty, slightly sweet coffee and allspice mix. The most impressive was something he called Madeiran, picked up at a Portuguese festival in New Bedford, Mass. - just bay leaves and rock salt.

Even better than the meat was the story that came with it from the festival: A big pit of hot flames with a grill on top, 6-foot-long metal skewers you rent for a few bucks. You buy the raw meat yourself, spice it yourself, grill it yourself and then eat while it's still hot enough to almost burn your fingers.

To my mind, that sounds too good to be true, and has now spurred hopes for to a visit to that summer festival. Because ultimately, that's the luck of knowing one of those pioneers of food - getting to hop on for a piece of the journey.