One step beyond dinner

Many years ago I heard about the restaurant The Fat Duck who made themselves famous by taking a slightly different approach in the kitchen. Fat Duck founder Heston Blumenthal is a culinary alchemist and mixes white chocolate with caviar and licorice with salmon to create spectacular 3 star Michelin dishes at his restaurant in Bray, about an hour outside of London.

I really wanted to visit this place but since we get to London so rarely it seemed a shame to leave it to eat so we opted for Fifteen London and I was very pleased, but I still want to get to The Fat Duck. In lieu of the opportunity to eat there, I have done a bit of research and I think it is so inspiring and amazing that I really wanted to share.

Martha Stewart says food is the new fashion and I just want to be fashionable! I love food and I love to cook but I would not call myself a foodie. I have entertained the idea of putting together a Tastebook because it would be very cool to have my own cookbook. Need to master food photography first.

I drool over the food photos and recipes on Martha Stewart and subscribe to newsletters from epicurious.com, allrecipes.com, prevention.com (which is mostly recipes with a side dish of anxiety causing top ten lists). I read food blogs like No more microwaves which is truly inspirational, Zoe inspires finds and tastes and Sweet Paul both with a beautiful clean design and for a bit of fun Domestic Sluttery. There are others of course.

I have at times been an obsessed Food Buzz user but felt rather the interloper as most users are bona fide Foodies. Foodies like you see on MasterChef, which is by the way an excellent show, if you want to feel inadequate in the kitchen. I am a foodie wannabe with ambitions. So I do research.

I have Molecular Gastronomy on my to read list at Goodreads and I came across the most entertaining lectures series from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences called Science and Cooking. The Twelve lectures, each more exciting than the last, are about an hour and a half. Each covering topics from Sous-vide to Viscosity, Gelation to recipe creation. If you set aside time for these you will see some of the most amazing pieces of food art and you may actually evolve into a Foodie – with a capital F.