I've started doing some Tweeting for a restaurant here owned by chef/owner/teacher/radio personality Bruce Wood of
Bruce's Kitchen or @bruceskitchen on Twitter. Now, in spite of the fact that I love to eat, my own expertise with food preparation and menu planning and anything related to hosting others for a meal has grown even slimmer in the past few years than it used to be as a result of being completely out of practise.
With the intent of picking up some ideas for Tweets, I've been tagging Bruce a bit like I'm some kind of groupie (which, for the record, I'm not, not that he's not interesting.) I really enjoy listening to his local radio show (Thursdays 2-3pm) on Salt Spring's radio station CFSI-FM.
In a stream of consciousness delivery, he'll talk for an hour about what he's going to be doing for his Friday night communal dinners (for max. 18) and other cooking tips. Sometimes he makes reference, in French, to ingredients that I've never even heard of. I really love to hear him describe sauces and what to do with all the fresh produce not to mention his love affair with goat cheese. I've discovered that his favourite word is stunning! The whirled peas are stunning. The risotto is stunning. The salmon in fig leaf then smoked is stunning. And, you know, they are.
Bruce's Kitchen is based on a communal dining concept and you just never know who you might sit beside. One day, a woman who had worked for the American embassy in Paris for 10 years came in with her father and we enjoyed our soup together. Strangely enough it was the morning I had been doing some Google research on where a friend might possibly stay on her upcoming trip with her husband and daughter on a wonderful month-long journey to Paris, Normandy, Brittany, Scotland, Wales and London.
These two events - my Tweeting for Bruce's Kitchen and also enjoying the smallest bit of research for my friend's upcoming trip - combined to take me down my own memory lane. Ten years ago, I backpacked through London then over to Paris for 5 days, then back to London and on to Oxford, into The Cotswolds, York, Bath, Edinburgh, Stirling, Oban, the Isle of Mull and full circle back to London over a 5-week period.
