Rafale

about me

How I learned to cook is kind of a funny story. Some ten years ago I was working as an air ambulance pilot and had moved in with my future wife. At the time I hadn't had a work call in a few days so I had just been sitting around the appartment doing nothing. After five or six days of this I made the grave mistake of asking my wife to be what was for dinner as she came home after a particularly rough day at her job. She essentially exploded saying 'I don't know what IS for dinner!??!'. A whole lot of profanities followed concluding with 'You're a pilot and you use checklists at work. What in THE HELL DO YOU THINK A RECIPE IS??!?!' I've been cooking ever since.

As a side note I now work for a national airline and commute to another city for about half of each month. On the ten to fifteen days that I actually have at home I'm the one who does the cooking as it bemusingly became obvious that I was the better cook between my wife and I. Who knew?

Lastly I managed to quit smoking four years ago and have used the saved money to build up an impressive wine cellar. My most passionate hobby, along with scuba diving, is creating new dishes to match with wines that I have collected. My better half, whose fault this whole thing is, thinks this is a most excellent hobby. Little wonder, she gets half of each bottle of wine and a fully stocked freezer when I skip town for work.

In vino, veritas,
Mike

Favorite Foods:

I love using my outdoor grill to make a variety of things. Steaks, whole pork tenderloins, cedar planked salmon, beer can chicken and wood smoked ribs come to mind. I use a built in Kitchenaid convection oven and a Jennair cooktop when the weather doesn't let me cook outside.

My favourite recipe is something called porkchops piquant. I found it in an issue of Saveur magazine. The guy who wrote the article was living with a roomie in NYC when he got tired of eating crappy food. The two of them, both neophyte cooks, bought a french cookbook and tried the recipes in alphabetical order with varying success. They made porkchops piquant three nights in a row!

Anyway, I'll post the recipe one of these days.

amanitaj@shaw.ca