It was only a few months into my tenure as the Free Press restaurant critic when I realized that — wait — maybe my job was actually, improbably, somehow even better than I imagined. I was sitting in a conference room with two of my editors who wanted to check in to see how I was settling in. During our wide-ranging conversation, I casually mentioned that two of metro Detroit’s most celebrated chefs were traveling to Italy to cook a pop-up dinner.

“We have to find a way to send you with them,” I remember one of my editors saying, though I’m not sure I heard her right, because how could this gig possibly get any better? Little did I know, that crazy idea would result in me producing a documentary that would eventually send me to some of the world’s most beautiful locales, including Traverse City; California’s Napa Valley; Sedona, Arizona, and the wellspring of it all, the Italian region of Abruzzo.