Foodie farewell: Thank you for the delicious memories. My heart is full.

What first pops to mind is not a rum-and-Coke by the pool, lime twist and tiny drink umbrella bobbing in the sunlight. It’s not a leisurely, rare lunch out on a weekday. It’s not even the bucket-list trip to Istanbul, to see the enchanted land of all my favorite Turkish TV series.

My first thought as I write my final column as a Palm Beach Post full-time employee is gratitude. I retire from daily journalism today, May 10, with a grateful heart.

I’m thankful to the readers who welcomed and inspired this transplanted soul from Miami nearly 18 years ago.

I’m thankful to all who shared their stories with me — the happy stories, the heartbreaking stories and every story in between — and trusted me to retell them in these pages.

I’m thankful to this newspaper and my editors for giving me the space and support to explore new areas of interest.

When I first arrived at the Palm Beach Post in late July 2006, I walked over to a newsroom window, somehow expecting to see Miami’s Freedom Tower, a landmark that punctuated the downtown landscape of my former city.

But instead of the Biscayne Boulevard of my Miami Herald years (1980 to the early 2000s), I saw South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach.

No Freedom Tower. That beloved structure that welcomed Cuban exiles like my parents and me many decades ago is now overshadowed by a downtown clutter of newer high-rises. In fact, there’s no longer a Miami Herald window for viewing the skyline because the iconic bayside building was demolished in 2014.

But how was I to know that on the day I first peered out The Post window? In the overly dramatic style of my childhood Hialeah, my eyes welled.

Oh! I felt so horribly far from the place where I grew up, the waters where I swam, the metropolis that grew fitfully before my eyes! Oh, the yearning! It stirred in me visions of memorized boulevards, a jigsaw of café windows, street vendors, lawn shrines and the lechón we’d roast when we were all together again.

It was ridiculous, of course. All of it. The landmark expectation, the misty eyes, the amped nostalgia, the proverbial lechón, all of it.

Had I been able to peer nearly two decades ahead, instead of through that Dixie Highway window, I would have seen something the luckiest of transplants might see: a new home.

My new home

My new home would bring compelling new stories to report, readers who loved to write us thoughtful letters, new dear friends and unfathomable culinary adventures.

I had been eager to come to The Post. Two of the editors who had helped shape my career at The Herald, the ever-inspiring Bill Rose and Bill Greer, were here, and they spoke lovingly of the newspaper and its devoted readership. Their glowing words proved true. I found the community at large to be welcoming, and readers to be solid enthusiasts of their local paper.

They loved their daily print newspapers and pen-and-paper letters. Having arrived in Palm Beach County with my sweet American bulldog Lola, I was thrilled to find so many dog lovers, dog parks and designated dog beaches in my new county. These details spoke volumes about the way this community valued quality of life over politics and hype.

Later, on the food-and-dining beat, I loved hearing from readers seeking restaurant recommendations. Their letters and emails told me about milestone events in their lives — a wedding anniversary, a grandchild’s graduation, a college reunion.

As a former local columnist who had come here from an uber-political city, I was familiar with the issues that divide us. My years at The Post as a feature and a food-and-dining writer gave me the space and time to explore other topics. And naturally, as a cubana, I gravitated toward food.

On the food-and-dining beat, some of the greatest blessings of my journalism years came into focus. Primarily this: Pizza wars aside, food is one of the things in life that brings us together.

A dish was not simply a stack of ingredients and instructions but a chance to relive moments and to reunite with loved ones, even if just in spirit.

This truth was powerful enough to launch restaurants, many of them built on the desire to share one’s cuisine, heirloom recipes and love of hospitality. Behind them were not simply investors, spreadsheets and inspection reports. There were heartbeats.

In more recent years, I was fortunate to report on the rapidly expanding dining world. Indie chefs established roots here along with their restaurants. They came together for charitable causes and, in the process, forged a strong local culinary scene that would reach destination status.

That status was reinforced every December as the Palm Beach Food & Wine Festival showcased many of those destination restaurants alongside national food stars that included Michelin-starred chefs and James Beard Award winners.

Of course, there were stories not related to food that still resound in my memory.

Inspiration through the years

A respected neurologist named Gus Castellanos told me his back-from-the-brink story. He recounted how he woke up after a drug overdose to find himself strapped to a bed in the intensive care unit at Jupiter Medical, the very hospital where he headed a sleep disorder clinic. His story traced his journey to federal prison, sobriety and a new life as a mindfulness instructor.

The late local news anchor Kristin Hoke shared with me the details of her breast cancer battle — the second round of it in 2007. She learned the news that her cancer had metastasized on the day her baby daughter Bella turned 3 months old. Hers would be a brutal, years-long fight against a spreading disease but she always savored the joyful moments.

During our final interview, about 16 months before her death at age 42, she watched her toddler and her husband play on the patio of their Jupiter home.

“I realize now that having Bella was all for a reason,” she told me. “She has given me the focus to keep fighting. She makes us laugh every day. I don't know how it's possible to have so much joy, but it is.”

Wisdom from a paella chef

But the story that keeps rushing to mind is one I wrote in 2017, one we dubbed The Paella Pilgrim. It featured a former firefighter-turned-chef named Juan Montalvo. I had stumbled across him on social media, and was fascinated by his paella catering business. I thought a lot about his story as I planned my transition into retirement.

Juan is a wonderful photographer and he would capture the setting at each paella gig — and these were lovely settings, sometimes waterfront, sometimes captured at twilight. What was it like to make the same dish every time? I asked him this and many other questions over lunch at Padrino’s Cuban restaurant in Boca Raton one day in 2017.

Here’s the snippet of that story:

“A paella is never just the same dish. The pans and the prep work may be the same, but the dish takes on its own personality with each sweep of the long spatula and every breeze that may disrupt the flames beneath the pan.

“Montalvo, who was nearing his mid-50s, did not know it at the time as he dutifully followed the repetition of steps, but each variation was nudging him closer to the next chapter of his life.

“But here's the thing: The Boca Raton chef known as The Hungry Cuban was all too familiar with new chapters. He had become a chef at age 50, after retiring from a nearly 30-year career as a firefighter. The Hungry Cuban enterprise was Chapter 2.

“‘Well, you always make your plans in Jell-O. I heard that from someone that RVs a lot,’ Montalvo's wife, Mary Montalvo, said on the brink of Chapter 3.

“Like paella, The Hungry Cuban would learn, life responds to the unexpected elements and it can change in a breeze. This truth crystalized before Juan Montalvo's eyes one day last year as he hiked with Mary in the Ozarks, far from the waterfront scenes of his paella parties.

“‘I wish this could be our life,’ Mary said.

“He looked at his wife, the color in her cheeks beginning to resurface from the pallor of cancer treatment. That was the day he resolved to pack up his paella pans and embrace a new adventure.

“Flash-forward to today: Juan and Mary Montalvo spend many of their days and nights in an RV, living a life they had never imagined.”

Still today, the traveling Montalvos inspire me to welcome change. Their story nudges me toward something new. I may not get there in an RV and I may not pack my paella pan. But I will always carry with me a deep appreciation for my years at The Palm Beach Post, for my readers and for all I could not see outside that window in 2006.

I invite you to stay in touch and follow my continuing food adventures and life with my pandemic puppy Lenny. You'll find me on Instagram @silkpalm.

Read recent columns by Liz Balmaseda

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◾ New West Palm steakhouse restaurant kicks off Sunday brunch

◾ A favorite seafood restaurant gets a glow-up in the Gardens

◾ Where to find the best meatballs in town? Some favorites!

Liz Balmaseda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network. She covers the local food and dining beat. Follow her on Instagram and Post on Food Facebook. She can be reached by email at lizbpbp@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach Post Pulitzer-winner Liz Balmaseda retires: My heart is full.