Art of living and cooking

I’ve started an erratic series on art of living and cooking on my personal blog, which might interest a few of the people here.

The first two items are:

- How To Cook A Steak

- When To Use Lemon With Fish And Seafood

There are a few things I’m trying to accomplish with this that I haven’t seen in most cooking media:

- How to cook everything. Most cooking media focuses on recipes, but what matters for cooking, especially day-to-day, is not the knowledge of recipes but the knowledge of the principles, techniques and ingredients that allows a chef to perform her art. Learning cooking via recipes is like learning a language by memorizing sentences phonetically and not touching grammar and vocabulary. I intend to focus on the grammar and vocabulary of cuisine.

- The intersection between cooking and other disciplines. Cooking is really physics and chemistry. It’s also an amazing window into history, culture, geography and art. Too few people are aware of it but it’s true. It’s also a big part of what makes it so great. I intend to show some of that.

Cooking is a part of the art of living but there are many more disciplines which I may tackle in the future.

Perhaps the greatest contribution France has given the world (aside from, you know, things like the separation of powers and human rights) is the notion of an art of living, a way of contemplating and enjoying the world which, like all art, requires both discipline and technique and the prudent disregarding thereof.

Watch this space!