Phoo-D

There are millions of cookery websites out there, most of which are very similar to most of the rest. Now here's a personal blog that's something different and rather special, well worth the visit if you truly enjoy the experiences of cooking and eating and believe, as the author puts it, that: "A little bit of high quality, high flavor food, is more enjoyable than a lot of low quality and boring food." The first thing that's likely to strike you about this site is the outstanding photography. Great care clearly goes into the images that accompany the recipes, not just to help you visualize how the dish is intended to look, but out of an obvious love of photography itself. The careful use of space and color is such that you won't be noticing it's a blog template for very long; the design is worthy of any commercial site. So, on to the recipes, and here's where I've got to suggest you go take a look for yourself; tastes are so different that one man's meat is... errr... well that's perhaps not the best allegory for a cookery site, so I'll move swiftly on to the site's philosophy, which is to aim for recipes that feature fresh, organic, and if possible home-made and home-grown ingredients whilst manoeuvering around the ubiquitous corn syrups and hydrogenated oils of this world. I can hear some of you muttering, ahh, one of those pretentious organic people, and yes, I know science has no proof to offer us that organic foods are any different from any other in any sense, and the manufacturers urgently want to tell us that corn syrup is, in fact, no worse for us than using gobs of sugar, and somewhere, no doubt, a researcher is even now working to prove that monosodium glutamate is the long sought-after cure for the common cold. But there are no snobbish pretensions here, just a person who obviously cares about food, a genuine "foodie", hence the name of the site. Now I must admit to doing a little cooking myself, from time to time. When it's too wet to walk to Burger King, you know. And being something of a fan of Indian vegetarian food, I immediately spotted the link to a dosa recipe. I'm enormously in awe of dosas, the paper-thin pancakes that come wrapped around potatoes and peas scented with aromatic cumin and spices. And I admit that I've attempted to make my own dosas in the past, with tragic results, so whilst it was exciting to find a link to a dosa recipe here, I was grateful to see that I am not alone in discovering this deceptively simple technique to be beyond mere (Western) human understanding. And finding a cook honest enough not only to admit defeat, but to go to the trouble of photographing the failure, well, that's something special. This site is a gem, do check it out. As the title says, it's "food for anyone with an address."