#fancy cooking

And it was Extremely Good and also fun. 

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I have concluded: “Umami” is the word “Karma” of fancy food talk.

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If I could eat, I would go out of my way and spend ll my money to eat at places like this. Chef's Table is an amazing show for me: 1. It is more based in the real, physical world than nearly all television, even documentaries. 2. It is very much focused on sensory experiences. 3. It is very focused on the connections between sensory experiences, places, and how to be creative about showcasing those places by means of taste. In this case there's a bit of a family connection -- I'm 1/4 Minnesota Swedish (the other 3/4 is Okie, which to me is its own culture/ethnicity regardless of where your ancestors specifically come from before that) and the Swedes in my family come from remote villages possibily much like the one he has opened a restaurant in. So the cultural context is familiar, which is important here. Like most of the chefs on this show, he has taken all his formal training and used it to focus on the specific culture and physical environment experienced around his restaurant. It's a remote village where they have to preserve things a lot of the year, so he does that. He uses and respects local traditions, being familiar with them as a Swede himself. And he tries to bring all of the cultural depth of the area into the food, so that by eating the food you are experiencing as much of the culture as you can in a context like that. (And yes, I know people overestimate that. But other people underestimate the possibility in some contexts, too.) But the really magical part to me. Is that he goes out into the local environment and finds all -- all -- of the things you can use to create foods, seasonings, or scents.. And then he uses that. With all that training. And all that cultural understanding. All mixed together with creativity. To make the food into an entire experience of the region on a basic sensory level. This is like... Something I see the really, really talented chefs doing -- not always the most famous chefs, but the truly talented ones. They bring together culture, sensory awareness, technical skill, creativity, and awareness of their local environment, and they turn it into something utterly magical. And somehow this show finds a lot of people like that. Not everyone is exactly like that, on this show, but a lot of them are. And wow you end up with a show that not only gives me good fodder for mental feasts (don't worry about me, I don't actually want to EAT what I imagine, and it doesn't make me depressed), but far more than that, gives me this whole range of sensory experience connected to places and people I never knew about until I saw this. Also it's the kind of thing I don't have to be looking at the screen to watch it, which is always nice. Like I don't miss huge amounts of things if my brain can't process visual information or if I have to be moving around the house at the time. I have no idea how it will strike other people but for me it's like the best series I've seen of mainstream TV pretty much in years. I don't know if that's specific to my particular tastes (no pun intended) or not, but this is definitely my favorite sipping-tea-and-watching-TV show in a long time. And I'm a frigging human being. Even during medical crises. Maybe especially during medical crises. I'm not a diagnosis, or a list of diagnoses, or a treatment plan. And posts like this are a vital part of that. In a way that may be hard to imagine if you're not in a situation where you're constnatly reduced to a label, or a list of labels, or a position within a system, and where most attempts to free you of that situation just make it worse. I'm a human being because I have interests and preferences and things I like and things I care about and those things are part of me and matter;and those things point back to parts of me that go deeper than words, just like this guy's food points back to cultures and places that go deeper than words. If I had the skills, I would totally do something like this in the redwoods I was born in. I would move back there and open up a restaurant and allow people to taste the cultural and physical background of the place, taste what I sense when I walk in the forest either in reality or in my mind. This guy had me the moment he literally said he was basing his dish on the forest floor. Different forest, same idea, I would so love to do this, redwood sorrel, mmmmmmmmm, and that's only the beginning. Someone with the real talent for this and a real ability to feel and sense depth could go places with this I can only imagine.