All the yummy food
The time is magical, and the time is good. The anatomy department is sending out invitations to the Ceremony of Thanks, to thank the cadavers. The taxi guy is gathering business by the Shacks, for airport rides. It's close to the magical time of school break and of going home. It is also far enough into the semester that we're all perverts, discussing what we'd like to eat as we're removing the intestinal tract. Consequently, I'm crawling around my favorite cooking website, collecting recepies that I want to cook and contemplating buying a grill for dad, just so that I could exploit it shamelessly during home visits, like, every day.
And so, for a bit of advertisement, there is Bon Appetit Magazine. Take a look. I grew up eating the same 15-20 (rather bland) dishes over and over again, where black peppercorns were the most adventurous one would get with the spices, and I had no idea you could crush those peppercorns until my mid-twenties. There were two varieties of salad, and chicken existed as either overcooked part of a stew or fried, dry and dripping oil. Sister was quicker to figure out that we needed to learn how to cook, and I too eventually got the idea to try better foods. But say you have a lobster tail or a pretty pretty cut of a fresh wild-caught king salmon. How good are they if all you know to use is mayo and red pepper? I've had bad luck with recepie books, so I didn't like them much and was fumbling my way around the kitchen - still tiny, but now my own and finally clean kitchen.
One day I walked by a magazine stand in a store, and there was an issue of Bon Appetit with the photo of the most perfect piece of undercooked steak and the most beautiful golden crispy steak fry stuck on a very toothy fork of dark gleaming metal. It had grains of kosher salt on it. It was the most yummy food photograph of all times, and I had to buy the magazine, even though I didn't think I'd be able to ever cook that thing.
Bon Appetit is how I learned to cook the picture-perfect, restaurant-style food I love. It's somewhat on the fancy side, but wouldn't you want to know what to do with all those crazy herbs and spices just sitting around there in the store, being all mysterious? The website is convenient enough, but I subscribed to the hard copy (back when I had a mailing address), for the experience of opening a new issues and browsing through the recepies and the entertaining and serving advice. They don't just give you recepies, but they also tell you how to cook spaghetti, how to build two zones within your charcoal grill and what to do with them. Or, it could have a whole section on home-made dressing, honey or summer veggies. The minute I get back to living in the States, I'm getting another subscription.
Can you tell I'm excited about going home again, where they have FOOD?? I have a plan, beginning at the San Juan airport, where they have a sushi bar at the airport hotel lounge.
And so, for a bit of advertisement, there is Bon Appetit Magazine. Take a look. I grew up eating the same 15-20 (rather bland) dishes over and over again, where black peppercorns were the most adventurous one would get with the spices, and I had no idea you could crush those peppercorns until my mid-twenties. There were two varieties of salad, and chicken existed as either overcooked part of a stew or fried, dry and dripping oil. Sister was quicker to figure out that we needed to learn how to cook, and I too eventually got the idea to try better foods. But say you have a lobster tail or a pretty pretty cut of a fresh wild-caught king salmon. How good are they if all you know to use is mayo and red pepper? I've had bad luck with recepie books, so I didn't like them much and was fumbling my way around the kitchen - still tiny, but now my own and finally clean kitchen.
One day I walked by a magazine stand in a store, and there was an issue of Bon Appetit with the photo of the most perfect piece of undercooked steak and the most beautiful golden crispy steak fry stuck on a very toothy fork of dark gleaming metal. It had grains of kosher salt on it. It was the most yummy food photograph of all times, and I had to buy the magazine, even though I didn't think I'd be able to ever cook that thing.
Bon Appetit is how I learned to cook the picture-perfect, restaurant-style food I love. It's somewhat on the fancy side, but wouldn't you want to know what to do with all those crazy herbs and spices just sitting around there in the store, being all mysterious? The website is convenient enough, but I subscribed to the hard copy (back when I had a mailing address), for the experience of opening a new issues and browsing through the recepies and the entertaining and serving advice. They don't just give you recepies, but they also tell you how to cook spaghetti, how to build two zones within your charcoal grill and what to do with them. Or, it could have a whole section on home-made dressing, honey or summer veggies. The minute I get back to living in the States, I'm getting another subscription.
Can you tell I'm excited about going home again, where they have FOOD?? I have a plan, beginning at the San Juan airport, where they have a sushi bar at the airport hotel lounge.