Food Network.. !!!

I L-O-V-E reading about food. In Sunday Mid-Day, one of my favourite columns used to be the one where a celebrity talks about his/her favourite foods, secret recipes, favourite eateries et al. I recall the time this article featured Adnan Sami whose fridge read like WOW! He’d always have fresh fruits with the likes of strawberries(I’ve never known of good s’berries in B’bay!), almonds, apricots, fresh figs….! Like he had some enchanted fruit-garden in his fridge! Plus his favourite dishes included succulent chicken masala, fish fry and ummmm…. I was drooling all over the Sunday newspaper that day…:-)

Have been watching Food Network since a few weeks now and man! I am sold! There’s food and there’s good looking food. Indian food, I always thought, has an inherent quality to look good after cooking. A deep red tomato puree, golden corn, roasted golden-brown chopped onions, finely chopped green dhaniya, long grains of brown-gold basmati….. DRROOOL! As for non-vegetarian food, it looked as good, if not better. The tadka of jeera, mustard and dried red chillies in oil, floating over the yellow-brown pomfret curry… the sizzle over the roasted butter chicken.. even the dry tandoori chicken looks beautiful when surrounded with the finely shredded onions, carrots and the deep- green mint-dhaniya chutney…. As for Western cooking, I wasn’t such a big fan. Never thought that it looked particularly attractive either. Not that it didn’t read that well. I recall Enid Blyton’s novels where the kids always ate scones laced with warm melting butter, chocolate macaroons and apple pies and guzzled endless glasses of ginger beer. Not to mention amazing Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners with succulent(they sounded so!) turkeys, the Christmas pudding with the drizzle of brandy on top…. and mincemeat pies!

Getting back to Food Network , all the chefs here have decided to latch onto low-carb cooking as the current American craze goes. Well, who knows when the next fad will begin and this low-carb plan will go kaput… Today, an Italian chef named George put together a beautiful salad with lots of stuff that I’ve never eaten or heard of… looked great, though! On a bed of Italian lettuce leaves with firm red Roma tomoatoes, finely chopped yellow’n’red bell peppers, verdant salad leaves, slices of chives and topped with raspberry vinaigrette… Sounds droolsome? Well, you should have seen it…! Then he made a low-carb version of shrimp scampi which had pink-white shrimps roasting in a sauce of white wine, minced garlic, chopped Italian parsley, Asiago cheese and dark green avocados… WOW!

I wonder if I’ll ever cook any of these delicacies… I mean, I am unused to these flavours and wonder if I’ll ever develop a taste for them. As for now, watching them on TV satisfies my palate… since I drroooool all the time!