the blender was on - and she took off the lid!

"Auguste Escoffier invented veal stock." Okay, so maybe not so yummy afterall! That's the first line of chapter 3 in the book she's holding dangerously close to the hissing blue light channeling out of the blow torch on the floor. She almost gags on the words and thinks seriously about letting the blue flame torch the book completely! To begin with, she's a vegetarian and the idea of a broth made from the bones of a baby animal pushes her mind and her gut way past the limit. Then there's the fact that when she enters a kitchen, especially hers, the kitchen appliances, counter tops, sinks and all related allies conspire to effectively kick her out it! A few lines down the page, she reads, "Escoffier wanted to do for fancy food what Lavoisier had done for chemistry, and replace old superstitions of the kitchen with a new science of cooking." .... a new SCIENCE of cooking? Now she was interested! Science, meant experiments, which meant thinking outside of the box, and that meant FUN! With all the thinking she'd been doing lately about shifting paradigms, perhaps she needed to actually taste this a bit! To chew on the idea of "cooking" as a blend of art & science, and to wash it down with a smooth new approach - experimentation! Her favorite flavors in the chapter were sentences like, "We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it."... "Protein tastes good, especially when broken apart." ... "A tasteless Glutamic acid, when ionized can actually be tasted by the tongue." ... "Escoffier aspired to a level of artistry that the tongue couldn't comprehend." They were the morsels of buttery ideas that awoke her brain's tastebuds and invited her into the kitchen to play! All of which held her interest, until she nearly choked to death on the totally over-cooked fact that Escoffier spent TWELVE hours in the kitchen preparing brown stock; That's 1/2 of a full-day to prepare a watery dirt-colored substance called "stock?" She never quite got past that one indigestible element of TIME! Even from her shifted perspective, and wearing her favorite rose-colored lenses - time was too valuable a commodity to experiment with! Luckily, the next chapter was on Proust's "Time Regained." The aroma of that dish simmering in the kitchen of her mind was too inviting to pass up. She was still hungry ...