Cooking

My "complaisant digestion" and enlightened gluttony allows me to enjoy a wide variety of food, from the showy, ingenious, liquor-lashed, cream-besotted exotic dishes flirting along with Dom Perignon to simple porridge. I for one can stomach the foods of cultural pluralism. But I am not a gourmand who eats so ravenously so to bite my fingers in my frenzy for food.

Surely I cant have four soups, a pheasant, a partridge, a plate of salad, sliced mutton with garlic, two lumps of ham, a plate of pastries, fruits and preserves as Louis XIV did at one sitting. He is supposed to have incapacitated himself with food on his wedding night. Mrs Louis should have really cut a sorrowful figure!

Somewhere in my adulthood, cooking became philosophy with me but am not that kind of religious foodie to undertake pilgrimages to the Meccas of food. I decide to devastate the kitchen myself though I pride myself on being a master chef in this era where most people do the cooking with their fingers(dial up a restaurant)!

I do possess a formidable collection of about 6000 recipes assorted in my computer but would love to possess that bible of foodbooks authored by Jean-Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin, the La Physiologie du Goût. I dont know how many recipes I have attempted in those 6000, but the thought of possessing them gives me immense satsifaction and glee.

Why hold back when the Creator ordered us to eat in order to live, gave us the inducement of appetite, the encour-agement of savour, and the reward of pleasure.

When kitchens are perceived as the laboratories of the laws of nutrition, it is then that cooking turns out to be a mundane chore, but when seen as an art form it is nothing short of ecstasy. As brilliant as a painter would use his palette to mix the colours the chef artfully combines the ingredients with finesse to conjure up miracles for the tongue.

Tasty food apart from being cooked by convention also relies on the inventiveness of the chef. It is here that you can play the part of an inventor and get to mouth the words Eureka if your guests enjoy the food or you could relegate yourself to the corner and finish it off all by yourself comforting your poor soul that aleast you found out one way in which it should'nt be cooked!

Cooking for the self isnt anywhere as exciting as cooking for others. The joy of seeing my friends relish my gastronomic fare with gusto sends waves of joy in me, and I dont feel the pangs of hunger anymore--the soul being fed.

So when was the last time you fed your soul?