@Charliecooks
I live in South Africa, but I cook my way around the world. I have learnt to cook great Indian curries from our large Indian community - I love exotic spices roasting and filling the kitchen with their different aromas. I also love good English food, and American baking, biscuits, pies and cakes; comfort food from anywhere. My favourite cookbooks are Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, all Alan Davidson's books about fish and Charmaine Solomon's Complete Book of Asian Cooking. I am compiling a food calendar 2008 for the Southern hemisphere, where all the seasons are the other way round. Sometimes I love to cook complicated recipes all the way from scratch - like making a French sauce starting with a two-day stockpot, then reducing it, etc., etc! - or a Bavaraian Cream from Julia Child. I love good food anywhere, but I hate pretentious expensive restaurant food like Foamed This or That or Mushroom Cappucino or Tomato Water or any sort of overblown so-called post-modern cooking.