Sean

Chicken Soft Shell Taco with Red Radish, from a small Taco stand outside of the bus stop. Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico

Sean's Tasting Menu

I have gotten into cooking after purchasing a cheap quick and easy cookbook from the B&N. They all looked very good in the picture, but I never really realized how easy it is to actually make many of them. Cooking is like any other art. There's the distinction between the pretentious kind and the "common folk" kind, and Post-modernism, similarly, has declared war on this distinction as any other. I'm proud of being both a connoisseur as well as a glutton in consuming quality food.

Now, onto the science part. Our noses are much more complex than our tongue. Most of the taste is indeed a smell that ascends onto the nasopharynx. We can distinguish between many different types of flavor based on its aroma. The taste buds only differentiate five basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and "unami", which is the taste of protein.

This brings right to the cultural exegesis of my menu. With all due respect to what science can explain, an interesting meal would artfully, mix these different kinds of flavors and uncounted numbers of smells into a delectable gestalt. This is not simply pretentiousness. For instance, my parents don't appreciate Italian food, at all. They don't like Indian food either. My mother, in particular, declared that she cannot consume cheese directly (as in with a cracker). Though she will eat a smidgen of pizza. She does NOT have lactose intolerance. (I don't, either. Yes I feel weird about it, but I think it's part of "god"'s plan, if you will.) And don't get me even started on medium rare steak. ("Just say no!") And yet my parents are avid consumers of soy sauce and tofu, and MSG for obvious reasons. A good friend of mine, who's Anglo-Saxon, concedes that he hates soy sauce and refuses to eat anything that contains soy sauce. Though he'll occasionally indulge on sushi soaked with it if he gets really hungry. My point is, people are, as they are always, very closed minded about food in general. And yet they are often, as always, hypocritical about their close-mindedness.

This is where my menu comes from. I call my line of cuisine Minimalism Cuisine in the spirit of Robert Morris and Richard Serra. I eschew upon baroque flavorings, secret mixtures, complex multi-step sauces and marinates that contain ethnically specific ingredients. I believe that the best food is all about the best ingredient with just a small bit of tinkering. Of course, I'm still heavily influenced by my far East gamut from childhood, as well as my love of good Italian food. (I was brought to tears in Shanghai, when I was desperate and lost, and all I could think about was George's Pizza, an old and ever so friendly joint around where I live.) In addition, I'm drawn to what's known as Collegiate Cuisine. What do college students cook when they don't have time? Thirdly, because of what I do, I am heavily influenced by the contemporary research on food and diet. So I try to maximize fresh vegetable and curtail sodium and fat whenever I can. I call that Pyramid Cuisine in the spirit of the USDA food pyramid.

A couple of disclaimers: yes I did make all this myself, using just a crappy gas stove and a set of half broken cheap cooking utensils from Wal-mart. Some of the pictures look really good. They are not from some other website. I took them. It was all on my table at some point in the past. It all smelt really really good. I have only one set of green plates from BedBath&Beyond. Yes, some of the pictures are digitally enhanced with Photoshop. This is also a collection under construction. If you have any original ideas, please don't hesitate to send them to me.

Just one more thing: the menus are organized in the "Russian" style with separate courses. There are many culinary traditions in the world (Traditional Chinese, old French, Italian family style etc) that combine the main courses into large portions and serve individuals with carbohydrates. In that regard, I have capitulated to the imperialistic superpowers. Though many of my dishes can still be served in a variety of different fashions.

Let the drums roll and here comes the feature presentations.

Starters

Ramens, Sandwiches and Others

Main courses

Desserts

Miscellaneous