Introduction

Cooking is the great passion of my life. I have always enjoyed my food but it is more than that; cooking, with its changing tastes, textures, smells and colours, and its infinite scope for variety, satisfies a deep creative urge. As a young child, moving from country to country with my diplomat parents, the kitchens of our temporary foreign homes became my haven. They were warm busy places full of exciting and unfamiliar foods; I watched, I smelled, I tasted, and my interest in food developed. Every three years as we moved to another part of the world the cuisine changed dramatically. Because of this I have always had an adventurous palate. But it was not until years later, in a tiny mildewed basement shared with a girl-friend, that I began to cook. I learnt by experiment, and because I knew no rules I was able to cook in the way I still enjoy most: using straight forward methods to combine unusual tastes or to create real fantasies of my own. I soon realized that each basic cooking technique which I mastered opened up a host of new possibilities. My hope in writing this book is that it will do the same for you.