GBCW? No fucking way! I'm not going anywhere, but that Asinus Asinum Fricat that has been impersonating me is getting ditched! Yep, the ass gets the boot! He's history. Dead as forty dodos!
AAF was my nickname at school, I was in the habit of making an ass of myself, got myself into much of it so I kept it for good luck. And lucky I did get.
Why the change? I'm going legit. I'm writing under my own name from now on. I have reasons, some of them valid and some of them plain loony (see poll below).
I have a new cooking series on the works and it's going to be called "Tales From The Larder". Hopefully it will be a weekly affair so press that subscribe button when the first one shows up, towards the end of this month.
Last Thursday I posted my last diary under the AAF handle, a piece on my neck of the woods.
An aperçu from "Tales From The Larder":
....Being born into a family of hoteliers had some advantages, to be sure. As a kid I used to spend most of my winter time reading in the hotel larder because it was quiet, the overhead lighting was good and the smells were reassuring. And it was also a place where I could sneak in a few slices of bread and hack a bit of hard cheese, sit on my chair and dream about the origins of all the products we managed to store between bouts of reading. René Descartes liked to do his thinking in bed, I did mine in the larder. It was my domain throughout the winters and certainly not the place to be in the summertime as the hotel was taken over from April to October by a brigade of noisy, fellow loons.
So it was in that larder that I became seriously interested in food and I made a point of scrutinizing and itemizing every tin, bottle, bag, boxed spices, jars, blocks of cheese, preserves and all the hanging charcuterie; the country hams from various regions, the armies of salamis, the rings of smoked sausages...I became an expert in label reading and developed a nose for sniffing out rancidity and spoiled goods.
This was some larder! A huge, oblong-shaped tiled room, with a wide center shelf and two aisles on which one could have easily skated around, I lorded over it from my chair and corner desk with great confidence. It had two doors leading into it, one from the main kitchen and the other one that led into the back of the bar area. There was also a small trapdoor leading down directly to my uncle's private cellar, in which he kept his prized collection of brandied fruits and rare liqueurs. No one was allowed to trespass his cache of goods. Except me, occasionally. I guess it was reluctantly granted because I was the nosy type and could not be kept out indefinitely. I was also good at keeping the place more or less in order. I loved looking at all the fancy bottles filled with colored liquids among his vast collection of maritime mementos and a truckload of old, leather-bound books (he had been a head chef aboard a large cruise liner and sailed around the globe several times, collecting along the way).
I have done a small outline for this series and the first diaries will be about traditional French fare, how to cook a simple dish with an eye firmly set on fresh produce and the other on the purse as we navigate through these recessionary times. Set your tastebuds to stun!