Glow Chef Questionnaire … “à La Proust”

Questionnaire … Why?

When I think of my favorite sections in magazines and newspapers, they’re always the ones that give me a sneak peek into the personality of individuals, women or men that I admire in some way. It’s fun, at least for me, to read about their thoughts, their choices and, basically, their preferences. We can call it healthy voyeurism.

As inspirações

In Vanity Fair, the last page of the magazine is called the “Proust Questionnaire” and is perhaps the most faithful expression of this form of personality questionnaire. The Financial Times has two pages in its supplement “How to Spend It” which are always the first (and sometimes the only ones …) that I read: “Perfect Weekend” and “The aesthete.”

I also love to look at the interiors of the fridges and kitchen cabinets of my favorite bloggers, and lately the new Taschen book “Inside Chefs’ Fridges, Europe” is on my shopping list …

So, I could not help doing something similar here in my little publishing corner.

It’s not even meant to be original. It’s just a glimpse of the kitchen life of the future willful victims.

Here Goes The Glow Chef Questionnaire:

1. What is your favorite meal?
2. What is your favorite dish?
3. Which dish do you cook the best?
4. And which dish always goes wrong?
5. What are the three ingredients you would take to a desert island?
6. Where do you like to shop the most?
7. What is your favorite piece of kitchen equipment?
8. What do you ALWAYS have in the fridge?
9. Tea or coffee?
10. What’s your favorite cookbook?
11. Do you have a favorite restaurant? Which one?
12. The best music to listen to while cooking is …

Sílvia Answers The Glow Chef Questionnaire

My answers, never before confessed, much less published. 😉

1. Breakfast, without a doubt. It encloses all the promises of a day that begins.
2. Fish in a salt crust, made in one of those places that know how to get the perfect outcome and later have someone who cleans all the salty mess on the floor.
3. Cakes: My cakes always look good even when I mess around with the recipes, usually to make them healthier.
4. So far, vegetarian burgers. Never right, they all fall apart!
5. Black pepper, freshly ground, makes all dishes much more exciting; garlic powder, gives a taste of well-seasoned to everything, including tofu; (sweet) smoked paprika, does the same thing as garlic powder and more, with a reminiscence of sunny holidays in Spain.
6. I shop at a variety of stores, but my favorite is Quinta do Saloio, in Estoril. It has everything and more, including the best butcher of the Lisbon region. My last discovery was “Shichimi Togarashi,” a Japanese condiment I had meant to try for a long time.
7. My favorite and indispensable equipment is my Oxo vegetable peeler. I am left-handed, and this peeler is terrific, peeling a carrot is a matter of seconds, the blade slides without a hint of hesitation. No injuries so far… I bought mine 14 years ago, in a highly unlikely place: the London Design Museum! Today this brand is very easy to find.
8. In the fridge, I ALWAYS have yogurt (plain, 0% fat, or now Harvest Moon which is made from coconut milk and therefore vegan), mixed salad leaves and almond milk (unsweetened).
9. Tea! Preferably green, Long Jing (from China).
10. My favorite cookbook is How to Eat, Nigella Lawson’s first book. I wrote about it HERE. It is very informative and very well written. It’s big, too.
11. Had one, but it went out of business.
12. For me, jazz … Miles Davies, Count Basie … or even the classic voices of Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald.

Challenge for the readers: please answer the Glow Chef Questionnaire and send it to us by email, with your photo and a brief biography. We’ll publish it!

The address is: hello (at) glowchef (dot) com