Archive for the ‘Chef Talks’ Category

Father of Modern Day American Gastronomy

James Beard

American food and cooking expert James Andrews Beard promoted excellence and variety in dining experiences.  A native of Portland, Oregon, he was born on May 5, 1903 to Mary Elizabeth Jones Beard and Jonathan A.  Beard, a shipyard appraiser.  His mother taught him cookery of all types, including informal dishes suitable for picnics, backyard feasts, and barbecues.  In the introduction to The Cook’s Catalogue (1975),  Beard quipped, “I grew up in the Iron Age of American cookery.  We had a cast-iron wood stove.… For stove top cooking we used iron skillets, iron Dutch ovens, and iron stew pots.” He declared iron the king in his mother’s kitchen in Gearhart, seventy miles northwest of Portland, but conferred some culinary credit on “earthenware, tin, some copper, and the ghastly enameled pots known as graniteware.” Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year!

The author at the World Food Expo 2009

Been busy these past few months preparing for my ServSafe® Food Protection Manager (FPM) certification  so I haven’t updated my blog since.  Anyways, the good news is, I passed the FPM exams and  also passed the advanced training for ServSafe Instructor/Proctor exams so I am now a ServSafe® Certified Instructor & Registered Proctor aside from being a  Certified ServSafe® Food Protection Manager. I am currently working as a culinary instructor for food safety and will be having ServSafe training and exams the whole year.

For this year I’m gearing up on giving you tons of culinary articles related to food safety, kitchen science, food trivia and history, quick tips, delectable recipes and more. Follow me on  twitter for my latest tweets,  http://twitter.com/davincicook and let us explore the art & science of the food we eat. Happy eating everyone.    -The Davinci Cook

Here is how can we adapt  Leonardo da Vinci’s Seven Spiritual Principles in our everyday culinary adventures.

1. Curiosità: “Seek the truth”. Develop an insatiable curious approach to life (cooking) and pursue an unrelenting quest for continuous learning and discovery. Curious cooks learn something everyday.

2. Dimostrazione :” Take responsibility”. A commitment to test (culinary) knowledge through experience, persistence and willingness to learn from mistakes. Most cooks ‘piece-de-resistance’ are products of numerous experimentations.

3. Sensazione : “Cultivate awareness”. A continual refinement of the senses, especially sight (food styling & presentation), as the means to enliven the experience. Sight, sound, taste and smell are all the keys to open the doors of experience. Good food badly presented is not enticing to eat.

4. Sfumato : “Engage the shadow”. To go up in smoke. A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox & uncertainty. Remember the excitement when you baked your first ever cake and not know what the outcome will be?

5. Arte/Sciènza :” Balance the masculine & feminine”. Develop balance between science & art, logic & imagination, establish a whole brain thinking. i.e. A well rounded cook is a master of recipe formulation as well as good food presentation.

6. Corporalita :” Integrate body and spirit”. Cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise. The best culinarians are the combination of being a brilliant scientist and great artist much like Da Vinci.

7. Connessione :” Practice Love”. Recognition and appreciation for the interconnection of all things and phenomena A good person appreciates God’s bountiful creation in terms of food and the environment from where it is sourced.