The beginning.

Greetings and salutations,

I've long postponed writing this first post, but now it's time.

Lets begin with a short paragraph about myself, in telegraphic speech, just so you know my credentials. I am 24, from a small mediteranian country called Greece. Studied Artificial Intelligence in the UK, took a strange psycho-metaethical turn and decided to go to Paris and study the culinary arts.

And now here I am in an all-familiar, burned, pre-election Greece.

But all in due time... so for now:

Tomatoes! What better example of a fruit that can add so much to a dish... colour, flavour, texture. I remember as a kid, I used to run to the kitchen, hands full of dirt, and take a bite off a juicy, ripe tomato. It was even worth the ensuing mess in the kitchen, and my mothers diminishing screams as I continued my fictional playground battles.

It is very hard today to find a tomato that doesn't look like a pair of augmented breasts; they look nice, but they just feel (and taste) wrong. I miss the simplicity and flavour of a simple dish with pasta, fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic and basil. Cuisine Gastronomique is all nice and well, don't get me wrong, I've had my share of michelin starred foie gras, truffle, lobster and scallops. It is wonderful. It also gets old. Foie gras shouldn't be in your everyday menu, tomatoes should.

So how do you take a product that has become bland and boring and make something simple and wonderful? As far as tomatoes are concerned, my solution is smoking. No, I do not suggest you smoke enough cigarettes to fry your taste buds, but making smoked tomatoes. It's simple, really. All you need is an old pot, a few handfulls of woodchips, a grill and tomatoes. Light, sit back and enjoy! Surely infusing your walls with smoke is trivial before the wonderfulness you have just created. Now go make that pasta dish I mentioned before, you will not regret it...

... which brings us to the Greek forest fires of 2009; via a cheap linguistics play, or a chaotic connection between the state of tomatoes today and forest fires. I could cheat and post a picture, but I won't. And since a thousand words are too many, I'll give you the linguistic equivelent of a low resolution digital image.

Maybe it's the society that makes me feel bad, or the millions of years that we've spend among nature. I don't know. What I do know is that a small piece of beauty is not there anymore, that the world has a bit less color in it.

I was driving through the burned area listening to this (sinners in the...). It's amazing that humans are capable of being on both ends of any ethical spectrum.

tldr: Smoke tomatoes, don't burn forests.

Thank you for reading,
Grammenos Miltiadis.

Introduction

Welcome

This is a blog mainly about food, but I will use food as a medium to express my opinions on the world, people, and myself.

Before I officially begin to blog, I feel I must answer a question to the world and to myself :

Why do you think that you have anything worth saying?

I don't. As much as I would like to find a reasonable excuse as to why my thoughts should exist anywhere but in my mind, I can't. This is just a selfish attempt to satisfy my need to communicate, so take it as it is. If you happen to find something of interest here, I'll be very glad.

That's all for now.