Hi, my name is Al

If Yan Can Cook…

Recently I’ve been flickr-ing a lot of foody pics. I used to get a lot of comments about how a ‘guy like me’ got into cooking, so I thought I’d do a bit of a post on it. For starters, I know a lot of guys like me that enjoy cooking and the web industry seems to have a few pretty passionate people that love it too. I’ve loved to make food since I was in year 4 of primary school and I was told ‘if you dont want to eat what we are having, then you can make your own dinner’. Although I couldn’t really cook a lot, Mum is a phenomenal cook and was happy to show me the ropes. I also recorded a tv show called Yan Can Cook every day and watched it. He does a lot of delicious asian cooking and I used to try to imitate him. Unfortunately, not realising how sharp his knives were, I would make an ass of myself trying to replicate his speed. He had a really cool way to crush garlic too, he would get the clove on the chopping board and slap it with the flat of his knife. Of course, having done it a lot of times he smashed it into nothing and chopped a bit and it was perfectly crushed garlic. The chopping board we have at home is uneven so I developed a similar-ish technique, and it lets me know my Iron Palm training is still working(normally I wouldn’t cut it this much after but I didnt want it to look stupid if I showed a big chunk I missed):

I guess there are better things I could have done with my spare time as a kid but I tend to have always had an excessive amount of interests(and still do). I still watch cooking shows and I have particular chefs that I like to watch. Luckily for me, I’m not alone here, I started taking the occassional food pic after being inspired by Vicki and her photos of what can only be described as food porn. The more recent photos have been for a flickr group created by Lachlan where people are sharing some awesome recipes and pics. I’ve got a hand-written recipe book of my own thats constantly being updated, scrawled on and gets food spilt on it, but it’s everything that I can cook that’s not in a published book.

I’ve also got a bit of a thing going with my mates where I will experiment on them using strange recipes I haven’t done before. So far there’s no complaints, but everyone’s too nice I reckon. As for my references to Iron Chef Burmese, I don’t think my skills are remotely good enough to call myself a chef, let alone an Iron one. I also don’t really set a theme ingredient either, I just pick 2 meals I think will compliment each other and seeing as I mostly cook asian food, they cross over anyway.

So there we go, the brief history of one of my many interests. Eat hearty, for tonight we dine…..

AT HOME!