I ‘m just back from an amazing experience in Seattle — a 35 course dinner with leader in culinary innovation Nathan Myrhvold. When he’s not working on the next round of his definitive and award winning Modernist series, he is pursuing space intelligence or how to zap malarial mosquitoes with a laser beam. This Microsoft founder and La Varenne Alumn truly is a renaissance man!

In his Seattle based Modernist laboratory, I sat with 24 other female cooking professionals and enjoyed a Dry Cocktail, all water extracted to leave a shimmering, zesty tablespoon of moonshine with a whiff of basil and olive oil. Plate after plate came out, and nothing was quite what it seemed. Chicharron for example had nothing to do with pork but was a strip of bread dough microwaved at full blast for two minutes so it puffs, almost explodes, and dries to a fluffy crust. Green peas were whizzed in a centrifuge and put back into tiny pea pods — good, but a lot of work and not better than a fresh pea in my opinion.  It was a fascinating meal that had us all talking and thinking about what was on our plates. I’ve already tried to zap a bit of bread dough in the microwave with no luck!

Cheers, Anne