Crap Chef

A lot of people talk about authenticity. "I found this great, super authentic Armenian place!" or "the food at that new Thai restaurant isn't very authentic". It drives me nuts. What does authentic mean? That it complies with some standard of what has been decided constitutes the ingredients, styles and cooking methods of that cuisine? Who decided that? When did they decide? Was it a decision reached by consensus? Were the people who actually cook that cuisine consulted? It's a meaningless term. It attempts to freeze a cuisine in amber, trying to constrain it to a set of ingredients, styles and methods that are familiar to or expected by that particular observer. Food culture changes over time and always has done. It's influenced by new discoveries, new immigrants, new agricultural techniques, fashion trends and an infinite number of other things. Is Italian food with tomatoes inauthentic? There were no tomatoes before Columbus. How about Szechuan f...

Bread Chicken stock (it's not fuzzy in real life...see next picture!) Sopa de lima Chocolate cake with dulce de leche, chocolate icing and walnuts Chicken pot pie

I started crap chef a long time ago, and haven't updated it for about five years. I'd started cooking not long before I started the blog. After years of eating out I was excited by how easy it was to make food that was relatively tasty. My repertoire before that had been pretty much limited to packets of instant ramen noodles, sandwiches and the very occasional stew. I was living in Buenos Aires and dating (my now wife) Veronica. At that time, anything outside of meat and empanadas was pretty hard to come by in Argentina. I would tell Vero about dishes that we were going to eat when we went to the U.S. or Europe or Asia. For example, General Tso's chicken. A classic of Chinese-American cuisine that was just not available in Buenos Aires, even in the (pretty bad) Chinese restaurants, of which there were few. Not something you want to eat every day but as an occasional treat, fantastic! So I looked up a few recipes on the internet and had a go at cooking it myself. It didn...