Pablo

Hey all
My name is Pablo and I like food. I have recently become partner in crime of Pierre’s gastronomic adventures and I am enjoying it as I have someone to share responsibility if I light my kitchen on fire. You will notice that I will also be contributing often to this blog.

I am Mexican and everything in my life has revolved around food and kitchens as far back as I can remember. My mom was in the kitchen every single morning (except for Sundays as it was church + restaurant day) and as I grew up I found myself spending more and more time watching or helping her cook rather than playing or watching TV. My own experimentation with food started early on as soon as I learned to make Jell-O from a box. Yes I know boiling water is not rocket science but hey I was 5 and I managed to not burn myself. After that I started experimenting with this very same jell-o and created such horrible concoctions as Lime with raisins or apple with honey. Also one time my best friend and I made special jell-o for another friend. I was surprised to learn that you almost can’t feel the onion and garlic powder on strawberry jell-o. At least we tried. Throughout time I learned to make my own non box jell-o and that’s where hell broke loose. I started trying real experiments that produced successful results, cheese jell-o, eggnog jell-o and so on.

At age 18 I moved to Canada and I found myself lost in student hell. I only knew how to make jell-o and I also had no money. So Kraft Dinner and Tuna were staples in my everyday life. After 6 months I had lost 20 lbs and some of my dignity so I decided to go do my groceries and experiment with real food. To my surprise cooking was easy as pie. Suddenly I had pork chops, beef, chicken, cakes and pretty much everything in my catalogue. If I didn’t know how to prepare something I would just look for inspiration at the grocery store put a few things together and see what comes out of it. I was happy that 90% of the time the results ranged from ok to unbelievably good. The other 10% had to be eaten anyway as I had no money to replace it and let me tell you, no matter how much ketchup you put on undercooked rice, it will still be bad.

Once I had a real job and found myself living in pretentious gourmet store heaven (Toronto) I was able to buy new things, new ingredients and continue the experimentation. I think my graduation to food was when I managed to pull off a full thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing, side dishes and everything on my own (with some help from my friends).

Lately I have a passion for everything related to Spain so in my contributions to this blog you will probably find a lot of bizarre Mexican-Spanish combinations but also my experiments with some classics as gazpacho and paella.

So before I continue rambling I just need to say… DIG IN !