Cooking amusements when one is ill

Here in the Western world, we've historically avoided foods that are good for us. Oh, we've made some important strides toward health improvement: we've added vitamins to our soda, supplements to our sugared cereals, Omega 3 oils to our artifical butter-flavoured butter substitutes, and bumped up the protein levels in our pre-packaged desserts, but we still don't have quite the same grasp of healthy cooking other cultures seem to take for granted.

I say this as a lead-up to a guilty pleasure: I enjoy watching cooking shows when I'm unable to cook, as I'm saved from the immediate desire to try new things, but I can still get vicarious pleasure from envisioning how a completed dish will taste. Then, too, every now and then I'll hear something that ties in with my degree in History -- or just my twisted sense of humor -- and I'll wind up giggling uncontrollably.

I adore watching Ming Tsai cook, in part because he's got an incredibly sharp wit, and in part because of his phenomenal skill with food. And, occasionally, he'll say something that makes me laugh at its double-meaning. His food knowlege meshed seamlessly with my sense of the absurd during one of his podcasts when he was talking about Edamame, and -- as could be interpreted based on my earlier comments vis-à-vis our cultural leanings -- its "natural anti-Occident properties."