Dry-Fried Sichuan Beef

Chinese cooking is one of the most diverse forms of food in the world. This probably isn’t surprising given the fact that China has a population of 1.3 billion people and is the fourth largest country in the world by land mass. People in the Western world often associate Chinese food with simple and westernised dishes such as Honey Chicken, spring rolls and Kung Pow Chicken. While these are certainly tasty dishes in their own right, the depth and variety of Chinese cooking is extraordinary, and often is not exemplified well in Western countries, although I believe we are lucky in Australia (particularly Sydney) to have so many excellent Chinese chefs and restaurants, and as such we have a closer appreciation of genuine Chinese cuisine. The restaurant that instantly comes to mind is The East, right at the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Its dishes are mouth-wateringly delicious and the setting could not be more perfect. And incredibly, it’s actually not too expensive, which is amazing given everything in Sydney costs you nearly another mortgage!

Chinese food ranges from province to province, from the lush and dense east coast to the arid, desert setting of the west, not to mention all of the provinces in between, such as Sichuan province. Certainly, Chinese people are known to have intriguing eating habits, and not all Chinese food is exactly appealing. We all know the dogs used in Southern Chinese cooking, and I recall a TV special leading up to the Beijing Olympics displaying one of many Chinese restaurants that specialise specifically in ‘genital’ dishes. The journalist, I believe, had a lovely taste of deer penis, which many Chinese people believe has medicinal and spiritual qualities and is often used as an aphrodisiac. While I have eaten fried cockroaches in Western Thailand, I’m quite sure that I would have to leave the dog and penis dishes to their local fans. However, this is a mere microcosm of Chinese cuisine, and Chinese food is eaten with passion in Chinatowns in every major city throughout the world.

This dish obviously comes from Sichuan province, roughly in the middle of China, and is a recipe I picked up from perhaps Australia’s best Chinese chef, Kylie Kwong. Sichuan food, to my recollection at least, is well known for its spicy and exotic qualities, and this recipe is a perfect example of its cuisine, although without a huge hit of heat. I’ve watched all of Kylie Kwong’s cooking DVDs, and I love how she has such passion for the food of her homeland and how she makes her recipes relatively simple to follow. If anything, her recipes in Simple Chinese Cooking are too basic, but they do provide an excellent introduction to cooking Chinese food, and illustrating the basic elements of Chinese dishes, such as how to make Sichuan salt and pepper used in this dish and many others. I will definitely buy her other cookbooks which, I believe, delve further into Chinese food and explore more exotic and complicated dishes, although often the simplest dishes, done well, are the most delicious. One of the great tips I picked up from Kwong that I now use all the time is, when I need to cut beef or steak into thin slices, to wrap the beef tightly in cling-film and place it in the freezer for half an hour. It really works, as it makes it so much easier to cut the beef into thin strips of meat appropriate for stir-fry.

I loved this dish, and I didn’t go light on the shredded iceberg lettuce leaves – I found that they provided a delicious contrast to the meat and enhanced the flavours. I really enjoyed making the Sichuan pepper and salt, and I now have a big tub of it stored for future cooking. By the way, this is something I’ve been meaning to say – in my recipes, I always increase the amount of garlic, as all my friends know that I’m a garlic fanatic. I never thought I would be worse than my brother – when I was younger I would sometimes get home and the house (very big) would absolutely reek of garlic. I have remembered to edit the recipes so far to reflect the actual amount of garlic called for (for example, I used 5 garlic cloves in this recipe, not 2), so if one of my recipes happens to call for an absurd amount of garlic, please prompt me with a comment to make sure I haven’t forgotten to edit it appropriately.

Recipe (serves 2):

2 x 300g beef fillets

1½ cups vegetable oil

2 large red chillies, finely sliced

1 tbs finely diced ginger

2 garlic cloves, finely diced

2 tbs Hoisin sauce

2 tsp Sichuan pepper & salt

1 cup finely sliced spring onions

Extra pinch Sichuan pepper & salt

½ cup finely shredded iceberg lettuce leaves

Wrap beef fillets in plastic cling wrap. Place on a tray in the freezer for about 30 mins or until slightly firm, so they are easy to slice finely without tearing. Remove plastic cling wrap and, using a sharp knife, cut beef fillets into 5mm pieces.

To make the Sichuan pepper & salt, dry roast Sichuan peppercorns and sea salt (1 tbs Sichuan peppercorns to every 3 tbs sea salt) in a heavy-based pan. When the peppercorns begin to ‘pop’ and become aromatic, take off the heat. Allow to cool, then grind to a powder in a mortar and pestle.

Heat oil in a hot wok until surface seems to shimmer slightly. Add half the beef and stir-fry for 1 min, stirring constantly to prevent beef sticking together. Remove from wok with a slotted spoon, drain well on kitchen paper and set aside. Repeat process with remaining beef. Remove excess oil from wok and wipe clean.

Heat extra oil in the same hot wok. Stir in chilli, ginger and garlic and cook on a medium heat for 30 secs, stirring constantly to ensure garlic doesn’t burn.

Return beef to wok with Hoisin sauce and stir-fry for a further 30 secs. Add Sichuan pepper & salt and stir-fry for 30 secs. Lastly, stir through spring onions.

Arrange beef on a platter, sprinkle with extra Sichuan pepper & salt, and top with lettuce.

Category: Chinese

Source: “Simple Chinese Cooking” by Kylie Kwong

Rating: Five stars

Preserved Lemon

So obviously preserved lemons are not a recipe in and of themselves – I’m sure I don’t need to make that clear but one of my friends may be mistaken. After all, he believed that Paul Newman was famous because of his salad dressings! Need I say more? I decided to prepare preserved lemon because it’s used in North African cuisine quite often, and I was at that stage wanting to cook a Moroccan dish. Also, I saw a recipe from Maggie Beer that called for preserved lemon (I think it was actually a recipe for Moussaka) and became intrigued.

I was completely ignorant of how to go about preserving lemons, but one of my iPhone applications, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman has some great features on basic food preparation. The only downside to the recipe is that it isn’t as multicultural in its recipes as it could be, and is very focused on an American audience, which I suppose makes sense given that I’m assuming he’s American. The instructions call for you to pour boiling water in a new or used jar in order to clean it. I followed this and, struggling with the boiling water, managed to get the water out of the jar and, without thinking, subsequently flushed it once more with some cold water to make sure it was clean. I heard a sharp crack, and there went my jar due to the sudden change in temperature! Fortunately, I had bought two jars, so I was able to continue with the preservation.

I enjoyed the process and layering that preserving requires, but when I shook the jar the next day, all of the layers seemed to sink to the bottom, so I became worried that some of the lemons on the upper layers may not preserve properly. It all went quite well though and, although I didn’t particularly enjoy the Chicken, Olive and Preserved Lemon Tagine that I cooked using my preserved lemons, it was well worth while, and I’ve still got some more time to use up the rest of my batch!

Directions:

1.4 kg lemons, preferably unwaxed, quartered lengthwise

110g kosher salt

4cm cinnamon stick

2-3 cloves

1 star anise

2-3 black peppercorns

2 cardamom pods

1 bay leaf

Fill a clean 950ml-sized jar with a tight-fitting lid with boiling water and soak its lid in boiling water too. Let the water sit while you cut the lemons, then dup the water out.

Sprinkle a 5mm-deep layer of salt across the bottom of the jar. Nestle a layer of quartered lemons into the bottom of the jar, sprinkle liberally with salt, then repeat, adding the spices and bay leaf as you go. Stop when the jar is about ¾ full and squeeze the remaining lemons into the jar – seeds and all – so that the fruit is completely submerged in the lemon juice and salt brine.

Set the jar out on a counter and vigorously shake it once a day for 7-10 days. During this time it will start to bubble a little and the dried spices will swell back to their original size.

Refrigerate the lemons and let them continue to cure for another week before using (the lemons will keep for at least 2 months in the refrigerator). When they have cured, unscrew the lid. After a moment, they should smell sweet and citrusy – an ammonia smell means they’ve gone wrong somewhere along the line.

To use in stews, blanch the quartered lemons in unsalted boiling water for 10 secs, just long enough to leech out a little of the salt. For salads or quick-cooled dishes, scrape the flesh away from the peel, discard the flesh, and blanch the peel in unsalted boiling water as above.

Cuisine: Miscellaneous

Source: “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman

Chicken, Olive and Preserved Lemon Tagine

I had intended to publish this post a couple of days ago, but the last few days have been a bit rough, especially because one of our cats, Maya, who I’m looking after while my parents are away, has come down with pancreatitis and it took a while for us to finally come to that conclusion. Anyway, I’m glad to finally get back to what I like doing – cooking and writing. Around three weeks prior to cooking this recipe, I had prepared some preserved lemons (I will post the instructions for doing this) and was awaiting the outcome. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I had ever actually had preserved lemons before, at least not intentionally, and I was intrigued about their texture and the impact they would have upon a dish.

So I searched for a recipe which not only included preserved lemons, but actually celebrated them and made them a predominant part of the recipe. Many recipes use only small amounts of preserved lemon rind in their recipes, or even use them as garnish on dishes such as Moussaka. This dish, which I found in Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Does..., one of the series of cookbooks that came with the Daily Telegraph recently, seemed the perfect recipe to cook, as not only did I want a dish that used preserved lemons as a primary ingredient, but I was also quite eager to cook a Moroccan dish. The recipe includes up to 3 whole preserved lemons, but I only used 2 because I didn’t want to go overboard on my first time with this ingredient. It was quite interesting dicing up the lemons in preparation for cooking – the flesh of the lemon was almost jelly-like and seemed translucent, and the rind was so wonderfully soft and tender.

Unfortunately I don’t have a tagine, but you can actually substitute a tagine with a heavy-based pot which is what I did and which proved to be adequate for the purposes of cooking this dish, although it would be interesting to cook the same dish using a tagine to see the difference, whether subtle or distinct. As for little tweaks on my own part, I didn’t actually use saffron, but rather a saffron substitute that provides the same effect, at least in terms of colour, and you can see from the photo that the substitute also provides that beautiful, rich yellow that comes from saffron. As I was slicing up the fennel, I was wondering whether it would impact upon my enjoyment of the dish. It’s the first time that I’ve used fennel in my own cooking, and I noticed the distinct aniseed scent which I’m absolutely no fan of. As it turned out, the chicken was beautiful and tender, but I must admit that I just wasn't a fan of the flavours coming out of the recipe. I think the combination of the preserved lemon, the fennel and the olives (which I usually like) provided for too tart a taste for my palate, whereas Asian cuisine, my favourite type of food, generally is sweeter. I’m sure people who prefer less sweetness in their food would love this recipe. Nevertheless, I’m going to cook plenty more Moroccan and North African recipes, and this was just part of my exploration of ingredients and cuisines that I’ve never cooked.

Recipe (serves 4):

1 whole chicken, divided into 4 pieces

Olive oil

1-2 large bulbs of fennel

2 onions, peeled and roughly chopped

Small bunch of fresh coriander

2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced

2-3 preserved lemons, deseeded & chopped

80g black and green olives, stoned

A good pinch of saffron

500ml hot chicken stock

Couscous

Spice rub

1 heaped tsp coriander seeds, bashed up

1 tsp ground cumin

1 heaped tsp ground ginger

2 tbs olive oil

Sea salt & freshly ground black pepper

Mix all the spice rub ingredients together in a small bowl. Put the chicken pieces in a large bowl, massage them with the spice rub then cover with cling film and put into the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or, even better, overnight.

Heat a generous lug of olive oil in a tagine or casserole-type pan and fry the chicken pieces over a medium heat, skin side down first, for about 5-10 mins or until golden brown.

While the chicken fries, chop each fennel bulb into 8 wedges and add these to the pan along with the onions, coriander stalks and garlic. Stir well and fry for a couple more minutes, then mix in the preserved lemons, olives and saffron. Pour in the hot stock, give everything a good stir, then cover with a lid or foil and simmer on a low heat for 1½ hours, or until the meat starts to fall away from the bone. Halfway through, have a check and give it a good stir. Add a splash of water if it looks dry.

After 1½ hours, stir gently. If it’s still a bit liquidy, leave it to thicken with the lid off for a bit more. Sprinkle with coriander leaves, and serve with a large bowl of steaming couscous.

Category: Moroccan

Source: “Jamie Does...” by Jamie Oliver

Rating: Two stars

Five Spice Caramel Pork (Thit Heo Kho Tieu)



Someone once said to me that Vietnamese food is like Thai food but without the flavour. While I must admit that Thai food is my favourite cuisine, Vietnamese food can be full of flavour, spice and colour. On my first trip to Vietnam, my friend and I took part in a Vietnamese cooking class at Hoi An, a beautiful town which used to be a Portuguese trading village. I recall making some very decent looking Vietnamese spring rolls, which is quite impressive in hindsight given that at that point in my life I wasn’t exactly highly skilled in the food department, except eating of course! The other major culinary highlight of that first trip was a beautiful, fresh banquet of Vietnamese food on a junk in Ha Long Bay as we made our way to Cat Ba Island.

My second visit to Vietnam, unfortunately, didn’t contain many fond memories at all. I had just begun my time living in Thailand, and I went to Vietnam with a German mate in order to renew my tourist Visa. Throughout that two day trip, we were pick-pocketed, overcharged by the hotel, ripped off by a ‘tourist guide’, nearly involved in a fight through no part of our own, and tricked into going to a ‘karaoke’ club where we found ourselves surrounded by over twenty girls and, within ten minutes (during which we were trying to extricate ourselves from the position we were in), were slapped with a bill for over thirty beers which the girls had apparently had and which we had apparently agreed to pay for!!! Ah, the memories.

At this stage, I’m not too well versed in Vietnamese cuisine. I do enjoy Pho in the morning, although as an Asian breakfast I don’t think you can go past Khao Tom Moo (Thai Rice Soup with Pork), which I have cooked and will post at some stage in the near future. I think Luke Nguyen’s cooking show on SBS, which I managed to see the end of when I returned to Australia, displayed some beautiful dishes and the range of ingredients and recipes in Vietnamese cuisine. I didn’t intentionally seek to cook a Vietnamese dish – rather, I was captured by the picture of this recipe on the iPhone application for taste.com. While I’m usually not a fan of anything that has a flavour similar to aniseed, I love the depth of flavour and smokiness that star anise provides to dishes, and the cut of meat, caramelised by the palm sugar, made this dish melt in my mouth and became one of the best dishes I had eaten in a long time. You know that feeling when you take your first bite and it’s almost indescribably delicious, and you can’t believe that you actually cooked it! What really lifted this dish too, not that it needed lifting I suppose, was the addition of fresh slices of Lebanese cucumber and chopped coriander to the steamed rice. I thought to myself, yeah sure, it will probably be nice, but it surprised me how well it complimented and improved the pork, primarily I think because it provides a cold and crunchy contrast to the hot and caramelised pork. I’ll definitely prepare my rice like this much more in the future for such dishes.

Recipe (serves 3-4):

1kg pork belly

1 tbs peanut oil

8 eschallots

6 garlic cloves

60ml soy sauce

125g palm sugar

250ml water

2 whole star anise

1 tsp Chinese five spice

1 tbs fish sauce

8 spring onions

Jasmine Rice

1 Lebanese cucumber

½ cup coriander

Heat the oil in a wok over a high heat. Add 1/3 of the pork and stir-fry for 5 minutes or until brown. Repeat in two more batches.

Heat remaining oil in wok over medium heat. Add eschallots and garlic and cook for 5 minutes or until golden.

Add pork, soy sauce, palm sugar, water, star anise and five spice. Bring to the boil.

Reduce heat to low and cook, covered and stirring occasionally, for 1 hour or until the pork is tender.

Increase heat to high and bring to the boil. Cook for 10 minutes or until sauce thickens.

Add the fish sauce and ½ the spring onions and stir to combine.

Garnish with remaining spring onions and serve with rice topped with cucumber and coriander leaves.

Cuisine: Vietnamese

Source: http://www.taste.com.au/ (Winter) iPhone Application

Rating: Five stars

Mushroom Risotto

I was going through my plans for a dinner party that I was throwing in a week’s time and thinking about what I would cook. Firstly, I didn’t want to cook an Asian dish as that would probably be expected, given that it’s my favourite cuisine. The other major issue was that my friend’s girlfriend is a vegetarian, so I wanted to cook something that was tasty and satisfying. Not too long before I had cooked a Cauliflower Curry and thought that I could serve that, but I just didn’t think it had the depth of flavour or may not be a sufficient main course. So I decided that a risotto would be appropriate, and this mushroom risotto seemed perfect. The great thing about mushrooms is that they are quite fleshy and meaty and they seem to retain flavour so well as long as you don’t wash them with water and drain away all their flavour.

The first time I ever cooked risotto, years ago obviously, I had no idea that you had to use Arborio rice, so I just picked up a random packet of rice which happened to be basmati rice. As you can imagine, it didn’t exactly turn out the way it should have! Now, I really enjoy cooking risottos, as it’s a balancing act to make sure the rice turns out well. Whereas when you cook paella you pour in all the stock at once, with risotto it’s a very caring form of cooking – constantly paying attention to the condition of the rice and ‘feeding’ it more stock when it gets ‘thirsty’. I got this recipe from Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals, and the thing that I really love about it is that it produces two different textures of mushrooms. Half the mushrooms go in the risotto and so become soft and oozy and the other half are placed in a pan and dressed with oil and herbs and then grilled to produce a crispy texture that produces a nice juxtaposition to the risotto. Because I cooked this recipe twice in one week, I bought so many mushrooms from my local grocer. The second time I was there, she gave me almost a disturbed look and asked me “What do you do with all of these?”, as if I go home and do something inappropriate with mushrooms!

So the evening went well, and this is definitely one of my favourite risotto recipes. It has an earthier flavour than some risottos because of the flavour acquired from the mushrooms, but that adds richness to the risotto. The only thing that produced a bit of consternation was when I was about to add the ‘large knob’ of butter. I’m a generous person, and that’s certainly the case with butter! We had a two minute conversation about what constitutes a ‘large knob’ (double entendre?), and unfortunately I had to tone down and think about everyone’s arteries, but butter and stock are the vital elements in a risotto!Jamie's 30 Minute Meals is a good cookbook, but as with my friend, I actually enjoy the long process of cooking and the preparation of all the ingredients. I know it would be different if I was married and had children, but hey, that’s never going to happen.

Recipe (serves 4):

1 large white onion, finely chopped

1 stick celery, finely chopped

2 sprigs fresh rosemary

15g dried porcini mushrooms, finely chopped

300g risotto rice

½ cup white wine

1 chicken/vegetable stock cube

500g mixed mushrooms (chestnut, oyster, shiitake etc)

4 garlic cloves, crushed

Small bunch of fresh thyme

Large knob of butter

40g Parmesan cheese

1 mug boiling water

½ lemon

½ small bunch flat-leaf parsley

Heat a large high-sided saucepan on a medium heat. Add the olive oil, onion, celery, porcini mushrooms and half the garlic, stirring regularly. Turn the grill to high.

Add the rice and rosemary leaves to the pan. Stir well for 1 min, then pour in the white wine and crumble in the stock cube, stirring until the wine is absorbed. Season and add a mug of boiling water. Stir well.

Add half the mushrooms to the pan and reduce the heat to a simmer. Continue to add boiling water or stock every minute or so for about 15-18 minutes.

Add the remaining mushrooms to a frying pan over a high heat, together with extra virgin olive oil and a good pinch of salt and pepper. Crush over 4 cloves of garlic. Add half the leaves from the thyme to the pan, stir them in, then take off the heat. Pick the remaining leaves and add to the risotto.

Put the frying pan in the grill on the top shelf. Continue to stir the risotto. Remove the frying pan when mushrooms are gold and crispy.

When the risotto is porridge-like, stir in the butter and finely grate over most of the parmesan. Add a good squeeze of lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Add water or stock if needed.

Serve and garnish with the crispy mushrooms, parsley and some grated parmesan.

Cuisine: Italian/Vegetarian

Source: “Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals” by Jamie Oliver

Rating: Five stars

Red Curry with Chicken (Gang Dang Gai)

It's quite apt that the first recipe published on this blog is my favourite dish. I cooked this dish for a friend and myself at PB in February. I had just returned from Thailand two months prior to the trip to PB, and was trying to re-adapt to life in Sydney, something that I'm still finding hard. My friend has also been going through a difficult time after experiencing many setbacks throughout his 20s. So we can relate to each other greatly, and it was great to go to PB to get out of the city and relax, or to get grounded, as my friend would say.

My friend cooked slow-braised lamb shoulder on the first night, which was aroi maak (Thai for very delicious), and which I thought would be impossible to come close to, not that I was treating it like a competition at all. I decided that I would cook Thai red curry. I was a bit concerned that it would not turn out well, but I followed a recipe from a Thai cookbook that I bought at the Bookazine store on Khao Sarn Road, and it turned out to be wonderful. My friend was very impressed. I had wondered whether I should use chicken or beef, as I actually had initially fallen in love with red beef curry (Gang Dang Nua), but I thought that it had the capacity to toughen up too much. As it turned out, the method of cooking this recipe made everything so tender, especially the vegetables. I decided to use asparagus rather than aubergines, as I’m not a great fan. They turned out to be a beautifully tender addition to the dish. I had to use canned baby corn because there was no fresh baby corn – it’s Umina after all!!! I loved the twist of adding the halved tomatoes towards the end of the dish, together with a handful of brown sugar. The tomatoes actually melted into the dish quite quickly, and added a layer of lushness. I topped it off with a garnish of coriander, which actually was lovely (I’m not usually a huge fan of coriander).

As I said to my friend, the best red curry I’ve ever eaten is at Center Khao Sarn in Bangkok. I would eat it probably twice a week, if not more! My friends, who have been there, agree. It’s just so rich and luscious, my mouth waters even thinking of it now. Red curry for me is the epitome of Thai cooking. I believe you can judge how good a Thai restaurant is by its red curry. Most can make a decent Pad Thai, but red curry is a marker of excellent Thai cooking. I was a bit hard on myself when tasting my dish, as I was comparing it with Center Khao Sarn's red curry, which obviously can’t be beaten. However, I’m proud to say that I was very happy. The only thing that I would do in hindsight would be to add one or two chillies, chopped in large slices keeping the seeds in, in order to add heat to the curry base. It’s Thai cooking, after all! One other thing to note about this recipe is that it uses jarred red curry paste. The advantage of using jarred paste include reducing the cooking time and getting to know the general flavour of a red curry paste. However, I now make my own red curry pastes because the ingredients are fresh and I can alter the balance of the ingredients depending upon my own taste (the spicier the better!).

Recipe (serves 3-4):

500g chicken breast, sliced

3-4 tbs Red Curry Paste

1½ tbs sunflower oil

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

Bunch of asparagus, chopped into inch-length pieces

15 baby corns, halved

1 red capsicum, chopped into inch-length pieces

500 ml coconut milk

50 ml chicken or vegetable stock

2½ tbs fish sauce

25g brown sugar (or 2 tablespoons clear honey)

2 tomatoes, cut in half

3 kaffir lime leaves, torn in half

2-3 red chillies, sliced into large pieces

Coriander leaves, chopped

Jasmine rice

 

Heat the oil in a wok or saucepan and stir-fry the Red Curry Paste and garlic over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes or until fragrant.

Add the chicken and stir for 4-5 minutes. Add the vegetables, coconut milk, chicken stock, fish sauce and sugar and cook on a low to medium heat for 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally.

Add the tomatoes, sliced red chillies and kaffir lime leaves and simmer for an extra two minutes.

Spoon into dishes and garnish with chopped coriander leaves. Serve with Jasmine rice on the side.

Cuisine: Thai

Source: "200 Thai Favourites" by Oi Cheepchaiissara

Rating: Four stars

Introduction

I’ve decided to start this blog in order to follow my cooking adventures, now that I’ve moved into my new apartment and I’ve found a new lease on life when it comes to cooking. What actually inspired me to start this journal was cooking Red Curry with Chicken for J and myself at Pearl Beach, the night after he cooked slow-braised lamb shoulder for me. I’ve never held myself out to be a naturally gifted cook, or one that can come up with exotic food creations and recipes off the top of my head. However, the satisfaction that I gained from cooking that dish made me realise the power that food has in my life. Not only is the process of cooking relaxing in itself, but food reminds me of places, people and special moments in my life, and helps me recreate my life in Thailand. I want this blog to record things such as this. I’ll admit where the cooking didn’t go as planned, and what I thought could have been better! All in all, I just want it to be a fun project that will prove to be something that I will be able to look back on one day to find some rich anecdotes (not to mention great recipes!). Bon appétit!