Great webisodes featuring great chefs

I am fully engrossed in my research for our late March trip to Japan and Hong Kong. In and amongst reading endlessly about restaurants and transportation options, I have indulged in some Internet wandering, and somehow happened upon a couple of really great web video series: "Chewing the Fat," the ones with Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain (there appear to be other episodes in the series with Alton Brown), and "Get Toasted" with Eric Ripert.

It all started with a blogspot blog about Tokyo by Abram Plaut. Not someone I know personally, or even a friend of a friend of a friend. I can't remember how exactly I happened upon his blog, just that it had something to do with a Google search about ramen in Tokyo. Then I noticed he had an entry about Andrew Zimmern (Bizarre Foods guy) and the Tsukiji Market, which included the YouTube videos of the show where Andrew Zimmern visits Tokyo. Then, I discovered that embedded with these videos is a menu of similar or related YouTube videos. One video led to another, and I found myself watching these two minute episodes of "Chewing the Fat: Batali and Bourdain on ..." everything interesting under the moon. They're each only a couple minutes long, but they're enormously entertaining. The one on Paris Hilton has some particularly choice dialogue not to be missed.

One of the episodes revealed that Bourdain recently became a father. Nosy and bored, I wanted to find out just how recent, so I looked up more on the chef's personal life, which led me to his purported infamous guest blog entry on Michael Ruhlman's site. Again, I've never heard of this blogger until now, but he had a link to Eric Ripert's blog site.

Just by way of background on my impressions of Ripert - I could not stand him in the early season of Top Chef with his thick French accent and super-serious attitude. He seemed SO pretentious because his accent was SO French it was unreal, and his smiles were so reluctant. This year, he was more extensively involved in Top Chef, hosting the final six contestants at his acclaimed seafood restaurant, Le Bernardin. Either he's lightened up, or his reluctant smiles and stiff attitude were out of nervousness, or somehow he was more able to let his true personality shine through this miniscule bit of additional exposure in a different setting than judge's table, but I glimpsed this time a lightness in him that he never showed before, and saw him laugh in a playful, almost shy and humble, way. I also saw the food that he serves at Le Bernardin, and I was impressed. On a side note, I just have to say that the last few episodes of this season have been a travesty (the episode featuring the culinary legends and their last meals should have been the final, and Fabio should have won with his perfect chicken).

I digress. Getting back to Ripert's blog site - it didn't look that interesting at first (a bunch of stuff about hosting Top Chef contestants at Le Bernardin - did I mention what a travesty Top Chef was this season?!?), but just when I was about to close the window, the link to "Get Toasted" caught my eye, and I thought I'd just click on it and take a quick look before heading back to my Tokyo research. I naturally thought it had something to do with cocktails or wine, but it turned out to be a series of videos, each of Ripert preparing a dish in a toaster oven! I'm thinking as I browse the list that this could be great, or it could be a disaster. It turned out to be great. I'm particularly interested in trying the raspberry clafouti - he tries his own dish at the end of each episode, and he seemed to surprise even himself with how good it was. Ripert's "Get Toasted" series is a testament to what a great chef can do with a toaster oven and very little time.

P.S. Speaking of what great chefs can do with sparse equipment and little time, I'm reminded of Jamie Oliver's "Jamie at Home" episode about mushrooms, where he and Genarro cook up freshly scavenged mushrooms right there on a portable stove in the forest - a few feet from where the mushrooms were growing moments earlier, or really any episode in that series; and the portion of Gordon Ramsay's "The F Word" where he identifies some hopeless, ordinary working folk, and shows them how to cook quick, simple, delicious(-looking) dishes. "The F Word" on BBC America is my favorite new show - SO much better than Ramsay's American shows.

The making of an Asian Anglophile-Europhile

I'm known for being an avid traveler, although I've often scolded myself for focusing only on England, Europe and the U.S., and failing to include Asia in my travels at all thus far (apart from a few return trips to Southern Taiwan, where I was born and still have family). I suppose even those that fancy themselves passionate about traveling can be allowed their favorite destinations, but being from Asia, I've always considered it a bit of a failing. Now that I am getting around to planning a visit to Japan and Hong Kong, I can put that all behind me.

Why is it that my interests have gone this way? I have two theories:

First, my Anglophile-Europhile tendencies in travel are due to the fact that they are "exotic" to me in the way that Asia is exotic to the Western world. I have a perceived familiarity with Asia because I was born there and my family is Asian. The cultural elements (food, language, faces, landscape) of Asia emphasized in novels, movies, television shows, etc., are fundamentally familiar to me. Thus the Asian cultural scene, while widely varying among the different Asian cultures and exotic to Westerners, has always been fundamentally un-exotic to me. British and European histories/cultures, on the other hand, fascinate me to no end.

Second, having spent most of my life living in the U.S., I know less about the history, geography and politics of Asian countries than I do England and Europe. I certainly learned less about it in school, and so am less familiar with Asia in the academic sense. So in fact it is a learned familiarity and knowledge of England and Europe that has bred my desire to spend more time there.

There you have it: a gloss on how the life of a Taiwanese-American immigrant has unconsciously shaped her travels (and probably also why I majored in English literature and have a very special spot for Henry James). I am sure there are deeper issues here that would make for great Asian-Am thesis material. More importantly to me, I am finally going to travel to Asia for something other than seeing extended family, and I am unbelievably excited (as I am before every big trip) to add these destinations to my roster of experiences.