About...Food!

Yesterday, I found myself glued to the Discovery Travel and Living channel. I caught: Jamie's Italian Getaway (groovy chef Jamie Oliver celebrates his 30th birthday in romantic Italy and has to cook for culinary-savvy and meticulous Italians--what a feat!), Take-Home Chef (Aussie master chef Curtis Stone, with a whole bunch of camera crew, ambushes innocent grocery shoppers and offers to pay for the items. In exchange, the poor souls will take the chef and his crew to his/her house, where Curtis will cook a meal for free! How awesome is that?) and Kylie Kwong: My China (a culinary show which features, of course, Chinese cooking, all shot on location in China). I just loved them all! The shows' premises are so cool.

What is it about food shows that fascinates us so? The obvious answer, I guess, is that food is one topic that interests people of all sizes, ages, races, etc. We eat more than the average "three meals a day," have these periodic cravings for our favorite dishes, and are constantly on the look-out for new, gastronomical delights, especially when home-cooked meals start to get stale to our taste. What more, watching all those sumptuous, myriad (from the sophisticated to the quotidian) meals being cooked and presented in full color is an experience only a few could resist. Well, I certainly couldn't.

Plus, there are all these wonderful stuff to learn! Yesterday, for example, I found out that Zucchini flowers can be eaten. You just stuff some cheese into them, deep-fry, then, voila! You have yourself fried Zucchini flowers! But what else could they be, eh? Other tidbits: stir-fried Lotus roots are a favorite Chinese delicacy, though the harvesting alone is a really arduous process; and, in Italy, a box of pizza is meant to be eaten by one person (ain't that heaven?).

Am definitely hooked.

The sad thing is that I was never really much of a cook. Unlike some people who get their first taste of kitchen navigation (whaat?) at a young age, I learned how to cook when I was already in College and found myself away from home. My friends/house-mates, then, Emillie, Ribbon and Fenina, patiently taught me the art of frying (I will never forget the giant blister I got the first time I tried to fry tilapia and I've always dreaded frying, from then on), sauteeing, boiling, and all that stuff. I know very few recipes, and am thankful that I was able to write down my Lola's (she was a master cook, oh yes, she was!) precious recipes before she passed away. I make good adobo (my own concoction: Shan-style adobo!) and beef steak (my Lola's recipe), though, and some pasta (mac and cheese, Puttanesca). And, once, when I cooked carbonara for my team and some friends, they praised it to the high heavens and are cajoling me, until now, to cook another batch for them.

I think I will, soon.

:)