Welcome to Cooking Dangerously!  I started this blog for culinary risk-takers.  For people who want to enter new realms of gustatory experience.  For people who want to terrify their family and friends by putting strange plants and animal parts on their plates.  For people who want to have fun experimenting with food.

My goal is to come home regularly from the grocery store, market, food boutique, or cultural specialty store with something that I don’t recognize, or something that I do recognize but have never cooked, or with an animal part that skittish eaters would avoid at all costs.  I’ll research what it is and how best to prepare it, and then will summarize its properties, benefits, and any other interesting facts about it.  Most importantly, I’ll find a recipe that I believe will taste good — this isn’t Fear Factor, I’m not interested in making people gag on cow eyeballs or something — and then I’ll feed it to friends and family and ask for their feedback.  Hopefully, my posts will encourage readers to avoid the mundane in their own kitchens, and to respond with their own recipes, experiences, and suggestions.

I’ll conclude each entry by rating the deliciousness of each new food, based on the responses of the guinea pigs who will be taste testing what I’ve cooked.  The rating will depend greatly on the recipe I’ve selected, of course, but I’ll do my best to try for something enjoyable.  This is where I’ll appreciate the help of my readers, because if we didn’t like something, people who are more familiar with the food or who have found a better way to prepare it can add their input.  The low end of our rating scale will be 4 gags, and the higher end will be 4 yums.  I offer a very formal, highly technical, objective assessment of the world’s cuisine, I know, but if we take ourselves too seriously I’m convinced that our results (and life) won’t taste nearly as good. 

Thanks for visiting, and happy cooking!  I’ll conclude with the wise words of Fernand Point: 

“If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.”