Why Another Blog on Cooking...

Image via Wikipedia
Or should I say "cuisine"? Sounds better.

Those of you who follow me know that I started a blog some 9 months ago to vent out ... no, not just my frustrations but my opinions about what's going on in the world. Lots of things are going wrong and certainly deserve a comment. So I'll keep doing that in my original blog where you'll find everything about economics and politics: http://claudenougat.blogspot.com  
 Now retitled: Claude Nougat - It's Political, it's Artsy!


And here? You'll find everything about cooking. 

Well, not quite everything but actually what I've learned over 40 years of cooking for family and friends both here in Europe where I now live (mainly Italy) and over there in America where I began my adult life. 

Those of you who have followed me on my other blog will find some of the recipes I've published there. I thought it would be more convenient to have them all in one place, plus of course new ones - little by little as they occur to me, and depending on the changes in season and, of course, on bouts of serendipity! 

I'm a great believer in serendipity in the kitchen. My recipes, more often than not, tend to depend on what I happen to have in the icebox or come across at the market...And I do welcome suggestions! Food can always be improved with a little imagination. Cuisine, both high (the French and Chinese variety) and low (everyday "square" meals), is definitely one of the main things that distinguish us humans from our animal friends. I do have fantasy when I cook but I don't claim to have a fantasy that exhausts all the possibilities...

I'm also a great believer in METHODS: what makes food really good is more the result of HOW it is done than of WHAT ingredients go into the recipe - what I call "tricks in cooking", something that is often skipped over in cookbooks. 

This said, the QUALITY of the ingredients is fundamental and not something you can skimp on. I also happen to be a great believer in bio-food not so much because I'm against modern agriculture or an avid fan of green agriculture, but because all those chemicals that are put in to grow food fast and make it look pretty is generally achieved at the expense of TASTE. 

And, I suspect, HEALTH. No one has yet proved there is a link between hormones, fertilizer use and obesity in humans, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day such a link is found. How come the hormones in our fattened-up beef don't get transmitted to us when we eat the meat, causing similar (fattening) results? So better safe than sorry, and to the extent possible, I like to stick to traditional, chemical free ingredients. Like olive oil for frying...

That's the kind of philosophy I bring into the kitchen and I hope that many of you will follow me and enjoy the recipes I'm proposing here.

Please join and make comments, add to my recipes, enrich this blog. After all, food is fundamental, it's about LIFE!