Hi Everyone,
Welcome to my brand spanking new blog. Never done this before, but thought that it's about time I started sharing my passion for my favourite meals, recipes, cutural food experiences, inspirational cooks and totally wierd and exotic ingredients that I happen to, or have happened to stumble across/into.
My name is Jean-Pierre Lenferna De la Motte(totally flashy and extremely wealthy sounding hey! Don't be fooled:)
I am a qualified chef that started my career out all bright eyed and bushytailed in the dazzling lights of Cape Town City, South Africa. I woke up one exhausted/overworked/overpartied hung over morning, thinking to myself "OH S*%T I've made the biggest mistake of my life, I'm using my passion of cooking as a tool for making money!!!!" I know some of you are thinking "what's he on about, I'd love to use my passion to be able to make a living!"
But the simple truth is using your passion to recreate other's ideas of incredible food, and trying to please an extremely overdiscerning palate,( the latter can just be described as a miserable complaining hillbilly goat!) WEARS YOU OUT!!!
Don't get me wrong, over the years on my cooking journey I have experienced some really good times and worked with some truly good and real people, on this journey I have begun to "find myself", or shall I say my "inner chef", and picked up and developed some truly great dishes and recipes, some that have never even been written down, but are as natural to me as breathing.
I have decided to describe this as my "Soulfood Recipes", dishes that are created and sometimes recreated while cooking for close friends and family, in my/friends/families home kitchens, backyard barbeques, or sometimes even on an adventure somewhere eg. Once on a trip overseas in Venice, Italy, with my wife's darling family, we got tired of getting ripped off by totally unitalian immigrants trying to flog off their "Italian Cuisine"( at an astronomical price! I'd like to add), to us totally naive tourists(along with about 15million others) So with little coaxing I got the family to agree that I should make us dinner one night, and set off to one of the hard to find supermarkets on the impossible mazelike streets of Venice, with a modest backpackers budget.
That night after assembling what I would describe as an absolutely "Georgeous Symphony of Classic Italian Flavours", on the antique venitian dresser of our hotel room, we all sat around, each with a bowl of fresh crisp mesclun lettuce, real bocconcini, crushed plum tomatoes, salty olives and fragrant genoese basil pesto. We all enjoyed the best meal we had in Venice!
Oh yes, then we watched to my dismay as Italy beat France in the Fifa World Cup, on our boxlike hotel t.v. The streets went absolutely wild, some crazy italians even jumped into the canals for a victory swim. The elation might not have lasted long for them, as I think they probably would've contracted some seriously nasty waterborne virus in the days that followed.
What an incredible experience, that was a memorable night made even more so, by a bowl of "Soulfood".
