In my English class, my teacher assigned our class the project of completing a quest and writing about it throughout the semester. She began the assignment by having us watch Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock. Super Size Me is a documentary about a man that eats McDonalds for every meal for a whole month. The documentary discusses how eating fast food on a regular basis can harm your body dramatically.
After watching the movie, all I could think about was cooking rather than going out to eat. When I first started thinking about this project, I thought of trying something new, exciting, interesting and unique. Maybe I will try to lose ten pounds given that I have a wedding dress to fit into next yea?. Exercising at least four times a week would be a great idea. Then I read over the assignment and there were a few details that really got me going. She described our quest as needing to be wacky, surprising, and something not everyone else is going to do. After reading these words, I thought about things that make me happy and spark my interests.
Cooking has always been an interest that I love. Growing up in the South means that as a young girl you are not only taught how to cook, but expected to know how to cook shortly after you learn to walk. Southern girls all know how to take a potato and make it into a whisked slice of carbohydrate heaven soaked in butter or bacon fat. My quest is to create meals that I have never even thought about before this project. Not only do I want to create meals that are crowd pleasers, but I want each meal to be inspired by a different culture. After cooking meals from many different cultures, I hope to be inspired to flare up my own dishes with inspiration from cultures around the world.
When I first came up with this idea, I thought about all the recipes that I would love to start making. There were hundreds that popped into my head, but there is no possible way that I could make hundreds of recipes because it is not practical or feasible. After pondering my quest idea, I came up with the wacky and surprising twist to my quest for the perfect recipe. Why not create the perfect meal and put my own southern belle touch on things? Chefs do it all the time across the world. They take cuisine from other countries and put their spin on things and it turn it into this entirely different taste from the original.
You are probably wondering how exactly this project is going to play out. For starters every Friday night I will be making a complete meal. By a complete meal, I mean a main course with a side dish and a dessert. My fiancé and I always make dinner on Friday nights and most Fridays we have friends over. I hope to please my guests with my meals inspired from countries around the world. Each week I will feature a different culture such as Asian culture. My meal will be inspired from dishes typical dishes of that culture.
It will be judged on a scale of one to five in three different areas. The areas being judged will be taste, presentation, and how filling the meals made them feel. Taste is always important when eating a meal and an easy thing for people to make a decision on, but many people have different tastes for different things so therefore the meal had to be judged in other areas. Presentation is a very important part of cooking because how food is presented can persuade people to take the plunge and try new cuisine. Another area that is important when making a meal is how well it fills you up. I always love to eat light meals, but when you are feeding a family you want everyone to fill as if they received a proper meal. It is never a good feeling when you are hungry an hour after eating.
After this experience is over, I hope that my love for cooking will only grow deeper. I anticipate to gain an understanding of other cultures by simply cooking the way that they do. For example people in the South live life in slow paced world; therefore Southern cooking usually takes a lot of time. The most important thing is that I have fun making these meals and that you enjoy reading about quest. Maybe after completing this project I won’t always make the same dishes each week for supper because I hope to have a greater understanding and awareness of cuisine.
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