Full-time Foodie
Do you know your quinoa from your couscous? Your tofu from tahini? Well, I know a person who does and she is happy to be described as a full-time foodie. Someone who makes restaurant reservations before the flights are even booked or whose foodie credentials can easily match those of A.A. Gill, must be a gourmet of gastronomic giddiness. With cookery book sales hovering around the £100 million mark, entire TV channels devoted to all things food and drink and more pictures of people's dinners on Twitter than there are folk's cats, then for some people this is small fry. My daughter's love of food is a passion, a fixation, a fetish on a total different level.
Emily 'came clean' this week, when the weekend leisure magazine of which she is editor, featured her full-time foodie habit in it's centre spread. She admitted that all her holidays are planned around where to eat, saying that she likes to eat at places which offer a new experience or cuisine not just somewhere with Michelin stars. If she is somewhere specific, she likes to find the best local dishes - if she is in Naples, she hunts our the finest pizza and gelato and is willing to queue for hours for a taste. Emily loves everything from street food to 'posh nosh' as long as it is good. She claimed that the best meal ever tasted was at a road side café in Thailand that cost about 80p and it was just a simple chicken and cashew dish, but incredible (below).
However, you don't have to take the word of a proud father about his daughter's food fetish, check out her credentials:
Emily 'came clean' this week, when the weekend leisure magazine of which she is editor, featured her full-time foodie habit in it's centre spread. She admitted that all her holidays are planned around where to eat, saying that she likes to eat at places which offer a new experience or cuisine not just somewhere with Michelin stars. If she is somewhere specific, she likes to find the best local dishes - if she is in Naples, she hunts our the finest pizza and gelato and is willing to queue for hours for a taste. Emily loves everything from street food to 'posh nosh' as long as it is good. She claimed that the best meal ever tasted was at a road side café in Thailand that cost about 80p and it was just a simple chicken and cashew dish, but incredible (below).
As you might expect, Emily has a wealth of cookery books and her favourite authors are Bill Grainger, Yotam Ottolenghi and Nigel Slater. She also reads food novels by writers such as Giles Coren and Stefan Gates and only watches food programmes on TV. She loves food markets and speciality food shops and loves kitchen gadgets like ice cream makers, blenders and baking paraphernalia. I can also bear witness to Emily's passion for cooking exotic food, especially Moroccan, Lebanese (below), Indian and Thai. Luckily, living in cosmopolitan Birmingham, she is exposed to lots of readily available authentic ingredients - these are all important products are what get a true foodie's heart beating!
- Travelling to California to eat at The French Laundry
- Getting up at 4am to visit the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo
- Learning to make pasta while being shouted at by Aldo Zilli
- Spending an afternoon eating cheese with Alex James of Blur in his home 'Foodio' (below).
- Queuing for two hours for the best pizza in Naples
- Queuing for a Michelin star dim sum breakfast for a tenner in Hong Kong
- Eating her way around Cornwall form Rick Stein's to Jamie's with cream teas and fish and chips in between.
- Savouring crocodile and kangaroo canapés in the shadow of Ayres Rock (below).
- Eating whale and puffin in Iceland and live prawns at Noma.
- Eating a pongy Durian fruit in Thailand
- Travelling half the way across the country to Whitby just for a fish supper
- Eating bacon and egg ice cream (below) and the famous snail porridge at Heston's Fat Duck.
Can you compete?
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