I'm A Serious Foodie

I admit it. Guilty. I'm a food nut.

I know stuff about food to a level of detail that sane people regard as weird. I can name twenty spices that I use routinely. I can tell you how to debone an ostrich. I know about the existence of obscure things like butter made from the runoff of Parmesan Cheese.

A hot date for my wife and me consists of going out to a restaurant you can look up in the Michelin Red Guide, and I don't go to places that have less than two of the hard-to-get stars.

I got cable TV just so I could get The Food Network. I have redesigned my kitchen more times than I can count. I shop for fresh ingredients three times a week or more and plan my weekly menus the way other guys plan their romantic lives.

I was a professional chef for nine years. Well, a professional cook for four years and a professional chef (meaning I supervised cooks) for five years. I gave it up because I felt a call to enter ministry, but I've never lost my love of great food.

Recently, I've gotten excited about a new cuisine. God help me.

It's called Breakaway Cuisine. It's the creation of Personal Chef Eric Gower and you can read about it at http://www. breakawaycook.com. I first learned about Chef Gower's work by reading a review of his cookbook, ordered the book and went to his website. Wow.

The secret motivation was my Easter Dinner that year. I made a wonderful meal of Game Hens using a Gastrique. A Gastrique is a Western sweet/sour sauce that is a pain to make, but tastes heavenly. The meal was a huge success but as I stood in my kitchen at the end of the day I realized I'd put myself through a mill.

Most of the celebrity chefs on The Food Network or writing for Bon Appetit magazine are (or once were) restaurant chefs. They are used to convection ovens, stoves with eight to ten burners, double ovens and walk-in refrigerators. Most people do not have such things in their home. Even in a serious home kitchen it's possible to run out of burners because all the ones you have are in use during a complex meal. In fact, that happened to me twice on Easter and I stood there with a pot I needed to get on a fire but I had no place to put it.

Chef Gower isn't a restaurant chef. He's a personal chef, meaning he comes into your home to work in your kitchen to do a special event. This gives him a completely different orientation.

Breakaway Cuisine uses world flavor ingredients in an untraditional way. For example, it uses a green tea flavored salt to achieve what other cuisines might do with a complex sauce.

Breakaway makes extensive use of things like flavored salts, exotic crusts and world flavor ingredients, all put together in a way that allows you to cook at a relaxed pace. In fact, the cuisine was designed for a serious cook, working solo, in a less-than-perfect kitchen.

I am amazed at how much my pleasure in cooking has increased working with a cuisine that allows me to cook at a calm pace where I can think about what I am doing, and work things out as I go along. It's made my evening meals a lot more fun and brought exotic new flavors to my table.

I got so excited about this way of cooking that I gave away all my high end cookware and restocked my kitchen with French pots and pan made from enameled cast iron (Le Creuset). I did this because people writing on the Breakaway Blog had observed: (1) no one makes pots the way the French do, and (2) cooking in cast iron means you can just put the lid on a dish and set the pot aside to free up a burner. There is enough residual heat in the iron to keep the pot warm until you need it. Easy. Simple. Saves a step.

I'm delighted and impressed, and can't recommend Chef Gower's work enough. I hear he will be a judge on an upcoming episode of Iron Chef America, and he deserves the honor. Check out his web site it you want to know more. Again, he's at http://www.breakawaycook.com.