oink

"I'm taking a tour of France, without ever leaving my kitchen" boasts Laura Calder, in the promo to her French cooking program, French Food at Home, which they air constantly on AFC (and incidentally, where camera amgles, seductive poses and grandiloquent, mellifluous usage of vocabulary are concerned, she's basically Canada's answer to Nigella).

Whenever i see that, i'm inclined to think to myself "well Laura good for you but i'd rather leave my kitchen and hop on a flight to the real France and eat the food there.

But well, since there's something called work, Ms Calder's option is the best i can do at the moment i suppose. And along these lines something i've been spending more and more time on nowadays is surfing random food sites and watching random food programs. For example, even when i'm not hungry, HungryGoWhere is a frequent stop for me, just to ponder upon places i've eaten at and others i want to eat at.

Oh to have a nice $100 per pax steak dinner at Mortons including a hearty onion soup with cheese topping and some Godiva hot chocolate cake. Paying $100 (or more) for a meal is just not right to me though (perhaps if i thought of it in terms of foreign currency it might be less of an issue to me), and especially when i've been trying (with little success) to cut down on cow-related products just so to do my part to discourage the farming of too many of those methane belchers (and farters). Then there are all those hotel buffets with an amazing range of delicious stuff. I manage to keep myself away from those mainly by considering how a significant proportion of the hefty price tag for one of these meals would go into paying for the sashimi and crab legs and oysters and what have you, things that i don't eat (and it's not just cos i watched Mr Bean in Room 426).

But still, there is a whole host of food that i do eat, and would like to eat a lot of. I suppose the good thing though is that i am prevented from extreme gluttony by the fact that inspite of how many rave about the food scene here, i personally am not too enthusiastic about most local food, and, again like Ms Calder, get really interested only in the food from places further away (The trouble being that with the way i prefer to travel nowadays, it makes it hard to actually eat a lot of that sort of food from sit-down establishments when i am away and instead i subsist mainly on a diet of grilled paninis and ready-to-go salads, which coupled with the amount i walk is probably why i always lose weight whenever i go on holiday). Until then, it's back to more virtual pigging out i suppose..