Learning to love food

I am sometimes asked if I have always been a "foodie"; someone who loves flavours, experimenting and finding out about the history, nuances and variations of different dishes. The answer is no. I grew up in Zimbabwe and our diet at home was quite conservatively British, apart from colonial-style curries, peri-peri chicken and boerewors. It wasn't until I started travelling that I discovered just how exciting food can be. I can vividly recall the first time I ate snails, ratatouille, chow mein, satay and gumbo to name but a few dishes that set my heart racing. But most of all I'm grateful to Chef Paul Prudhomme - renowned chef, author and businessman from New Orleans - for his awakening of my palette and appetite for full flavours, not to mention for his sharing of insights and philosophies with me.

Chef Paul loves food to excite the taste buds. He has an amazing, natural ability to understand the science of flavour, but from an instinctive perspective rather than academic study. I have spent many hours in the kitchen with him, learning how flavours can be built up so that they lay upon each other and create wonderfully complex tastes. As much as anything, I have learnt that the specific flavour of a certain batch of herbs or spices can have a material effect on the taste. We have spent hours making tea infusions of various types of garlic and basil and other ingredients to taste how different these can be. Blending spices is as much an art form as blending wines or whiskies. As a result, we take the most fastidious care about the flavours of the raw spices and herbs that go into our blends and sauces. We entrust this taste test to Chef Paul and import our seasonings ready-blended from his factory in New Orleans. There is nobody in the world I would rather trust to do this right, first time and every time.