Comforts of Cooking and Culinary

Cooking for the week. Ya, I like my chicken on the bone and all those spices.
Yet I still relish the best apple pie I had last night at an invite.

The diversity in Australia makes access to various culinary styles so taken for granted. The overload of information from cookbooks, family and the net means one just makes time to try recipes and not excuses. The variety of ingredients available in capital cities just require passion and detail to undertake personal and community journeys in cooking.

I can ask neighbours, relatives and friends for understanding better the nuances in better cooking various styles.

One can then deeply appreciate the techniques, interplay of catefully chosen ingredients that affect the final outcome and the fun experienced in this respect.

You can choose authentic, fusion or contemporary. Dishes are created in a continuum and are never static. Usually when someone nice reveals an extra step or ingredient in making their cooking stand out, I try to reason about the cause and effect of such detail.

So when you dine out, it is not only your taste sensory you activate but also your mind and heart trying to work out how the dish turned out. 

It can be the cut of the veg or meat. It may be both pan frying and then baking in the oven. Some times, it is easier to figure out a dessert or baked item than unravelling the intricacies of a good sauce.

All the while we learn better the cooking philosophy of the chef or our home host.

Cooking at home also means you know better what you are eating. In the perspective of things, culinary creations support the bigger picture of experience - socially, business wise or with the family. 

The aroma from well placed ingredients being cooked gives each of us a sense of well being and satisfaction far removed from feeding our hunger. Good food provides an extra dimension of elegance, civility and purposeful meaning, all well above fulfiling a basic need.

When dishes prepared with passion and detail are also well presented, we should approach them with even more gratitude.