Panaderia Canadiense

I wouldn't have suggested the blender if it hadn't worked for me in the past.

I'll say Manitoba. That doesn't look like Australian construction to me, and the trees at the end of that boulevard look more like ash and maple than gum.

Pop it in the blender. If all else, fails, pop the sausage-grinder attachment onto your Kitchenaid and run it through that.

My doors are open, Genkinaonna! I'll do you one better, actually - you'd fly in to Quito, not Ambato, so I'd give you the street food of Quito's Historical Center (they roast Cuy on Saturdays!) and then the full downtown Ambato Monday experience.

I only find out about the frightening state of the fridge / pantry when said bad cook asks me to whip something up. That's when being appalled sets in.

I've been lax in downloading the camera, so here's dinner for the past little while (the memorable ones, at least). Baked chicken with fresh asparagus and assorted root veggies. Tilapia baked in red curry with red potatoes and camote, in a banana leaf with steamed carrots. Roast turkey breast and carrots with gouda-scalloped potatoes and a nice salad with tomatoes from the garden. Garden salad with an assortment of home pickles (except the olives) - spicy red cabbage, cumin bell peppers, dilled sweet and sour carrots.

I bet there is. Food is a universal thing, and sociopaths are often concerned with trying to "fit in" so it's a natural sort of camouflage....

I love Tilapia, rate it the highest among edible Cichlids, and have never ever found it muddy. Fresh-fresh (pulled from the pond or lake, whacked with a stick, and cleaned) then fried in a little oil, it is one of the best things going. I eat most of my Tilapia as flash-frozen fillets; here's one of my fave preparations - oven roasted in red curry, in a banana leaf with thin-slices of potato and camote. Before cooking: After:

I find it interesting that this thread, which was a question about how we all got started in commercial food production, has turned into a debate on the relative merits of culinary schooling vs. life experience. There are other threads for that folks - a lot of you have completely missed the point of the OP's question. Here's my story: I'm 28. I've been around food and catering my entire life (my folks did it as a summertime "job" so that we could travel a bit - otherwise we'd never have been able to afford it). My earliest and fondest memories are of catering the green rooms at folk music festivals across Canada, the most memorable of which took place in the middle of nowhere with almost no kitchen facilities, and our "fridge" was an old concrete bomb shelter bunker thingie. My father is trained in French and Russian service and has his Cordon Bleu and can thus justly be called a Chef (although he mostly works in our kitchen as the saucier), and my mother was the baker in her family from the age where it was deemed she could safely use the wood stove (about 7, I think.) It's in my blood. I am not formally schooled in cookery, and I have had my own bakery for about 3 years - and that all started because in Ecuador you can't find a chewy cookie to save your life. So I started producing oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies according to my great gran's recipe, my friends started sharing them with their friends, and before I knew it there was such a huge demand that I had to set up shop. I now run one of the most exclusive gourmet bakeries in the country. I should mention at this point that my Master's degree is in Scenography.... I think it comes down to a willingness to work very hard and try new things, regardless of whether you choose to simply build on the knowledge you've picked up growing up or whether you go to school to get a piece of paper certifying you know how to do what you do.

Hey! I'm not a bad cook, I just get too ambitious about buying vegetables and then end up going out to eat all week. Finally threw away what were lovely organic green beans I got 2-1/2 weeks ago in the CSA I realized wasn't working for me, and picked through the yellowing kale. I'm a good cook when I'm not too lazy to do it! That's definitely not a sign of a bad cook. I can't speak for everyone but I quite often come home from the restaurant with no desire to cook something for myself. I have good intentions when I buy stuff for the week but it doesn't always happen. I wonder how common it really is for restaurant cooks to get home and say "screw it, I'll just make a sandwich". You've hit on the exact reason I hardly ever buy bread or sweet baked goods. After a full day at the bakery, I could care less about these things and I haven't had a sandwich in months. I just looked on top of my fridge (where buns go to die) and I found something that looked more medicinal than edible. I think it might have once been a Kaiser roll. My list was meant to be taken as all factors together, though (probably I should have mentioned it up on page 1) - the sentient fridge beings PLUS the abused cookware PLUS the old spices PLUS melamine plates PLUS bad food = bad cook. If you're missing the bad food part, the bad cook part can't be inferred from the other bits. Lazy cook, sure. Cheap cook, almost certainly. I have friends with sentient fridges and all melamine all the time services who are excellent cooks, and I have friends with all the bells and whistles in their kitchens who are absolutely terrible. It ultimately comes down to their attitude towards their ingredients and towards the cooking process itself.

Who, me? I have a bakery! Why would I also want a food truck?

You mean I can excuse my love of interesting, well created, well presented food on falling out of that tree when I was 5? And here I thought it was a good food education from my parents....

Well, everything I'd want to eat on the street is already here, except perhaps Felafel, and I can actually do with going to a sit-down shawarma and felafel joint to eat that.

Where to start?!!? Tortillas de Queso - large buckwheat pancakes stuffed with achiote-oiled fresh cheese and cooked on a flattish copper pan over wood flame. Arepitas - tiny gold corn disks stuffed with queso fresco and diced green onions, fried in very little oil on a steel pan over charcoal Empanadas Dulces - whole wheat wrappers around some sort of panela-mollasses-spice filling, cooked as for Tortillas de Queso. Pinchos - street kebabs, basically; the ones I like are usually a chicken breast and five or six nice chunks of assorted sausages in a garlic-herb-butter baste, a piece of ripe plantain, and a small potato. Cevichocos - a healthy bowl of lupines (lupini beans) drenched in ceviche sauce, with fresh shredded carrot. Volquetero - only in the jungle town of Puyo, a Cevichochos with popcorn, tostado, and chifles, drowning in ceviche sauce and with a nice chunk of tuna on top. Maduro Con Queso - a large ripe plantain, blackened on a charcoal grill, split in half, and filled with cilantro and fresh cheese. Helado de Paila - from the pushcart in front of the Cathedral. He's been there for 55 years selling just Mora helados in hand-made cones. Sooo goood! Espiral de Mango - spiral-cut green mango with hot aji powder and vinegar. Salchipapas - new potatoes and little bits of chorizo cooked together in an enamel bowl over a small fire burning in a bucket. The term just means sausage and potatoes, but this is how it's done on the street, and it's how it ought to be done everywhere (IMHO). Llapingachos - these are the simple fried potato pancakes that accompany Lechon Horneado (roast suckling pig) and appear on large carts on the weekends. What makes them special is that they're fried in fat that the Horneado lady pulls off the pig right there and then. Choclos con Queso - grilled white corn with a generous slab of fresh Mozza. Jugo de Tamarindo - for some reason, the best Tamarind juice comes from the lady with the big bucket of it in the Cathedral square.... oh, the list goes on and on.... I could eat very well all day even if I only stuck to the pushcarts.

Peanut butter in 250g sealed standup plastic packages based on banana and corn starch polymers. Just cut off a corner and squeeze the peanut butter out; it self-seals, then compost the pack when you're done and it biodegrades. I don't know if it's available anywhere else, or if they're testing it here, but it's freakin' brilliant. I'd also nominate high-end vinegars in tinted glass bottles with corks.

Empty fridge apart from really scary veggies that are beginning to develop sentient life, and ancient condiments; dusty, unopened spices from a bygone era; one badly abused nonstick saucepan; no vinegars, cooking wines, or brandy. Melamine plates. Bad food.

coconut + honey + ripe plantain + peaches coconut + nutmeg + cloves strawberries + cream cheese frosting

We don't have anybody from British Columbia here, do we? That would be my guess....

Is there not a $3 alternative? That's what I use (Master brand), and they hold up remarkably well - I only blow fingers when doing things like heavy scrubbing of a gunked-up ceramic casserole with 4 weeks of use in the gloves. I'd balk at spending $10 for anything "disposable".

I do, but I've always just used small casting blocks for each letter (so that what I end up with is a tablet with the letter on it), then assembled them over a molten base. This allows me to paint the letters in white (for example) and then pour a dark base behind them, then just arrange them like moveable type. I'm not sure if I'm making sense, though. In practice this is ridiculously easy to do, but to describe it is quite difficult. Imagine that you've got all of your letters as individual low-profile tablet moulds. I had to make my own - I got a stampmaker to make me up a set of high-releif stamps for each letter, then vac-formed the moulds based on those. Edit - Kind of like these....

Only slightly crazy? Naaah. I'm 29 years old and fully gone in to the nutso-ness. Each of my cake recipes (even in their most reduced forms) makes about 2 dozen cupcakes. I'm almost to the point where I don't ever want to see another one, except perhaps the Chocoamor (Death by Chocolate) ones.... 10,000 feet calls for some interesting adjustments to baking powder/soda recipes, but I'll tell you this: I have never made better yeast breads in my life! I have very little atmospheric pressure regardless of the weather (a sunny day gives me maybe 10 kpa difference over a cloudy one, if that) which means I get amazing big proofs every single time. I had to take into account a third proofing, though, because otherwise the breads end up too airy.

The attempts at Kosher cooking with a hostage in The Big Hit, the last supper in Life of Brian (along with "blessed are the cheesemakers"), and of course, both the exploding gourmand at the restaurant in The Meaning of Life and also the dinner party that death crashes. On that note, although it's not strictly a movie perse, the Milliway's scenes in the old BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in which Arthur meets his meat is truly priceless as well, as are those where he and Ford are eating this awful blue and green Vogon food just after having been picked up. Also, Hudson Hawk, for the Italian diner scene just after he's robbed the Vatican. edit-spelling

Assorted cupcakes of the cake flavours offered in the bakery. I will never do this again - along with all of the salt-bread orders, it nearly killed me.

I have the kind of evil, ripping fast metabolism that demands that I eat three times a day plus snack frequently. So I do - although I'll say that when I need a snack I usually reach for a banana or other piece of fruit, or for a high-protein something like cheese or peanuts/peanut butter. I find I don't need to eat as much in the snack if I do it that way; if I end up eating something ridiculously sugary or carb-y I always feel like I need to eat more and then I want less of my main meals. I also eat on the Ecuadorian rhythm - breakfast like a prince, lunch like a king, dinner like a pauper. Needless to say, though, with this metabolism weight isn't a problem for me.

Darienne - foam doesn't work so well with frozen things; they tend to stick to it. However, and as crass as this sounds, those disposable beer cups are excellent - just don't fill them all the way up. In a pinch, waxed paper Dixie cups are also fairly good.