6. Public Holidays

If you get pretty serious into cooking, you will realise that it is something which takes up a lot of your time. You will spend hours cooking, and in your day-to-day life, with working full-time and everything else (doing the washing, ironing, sleeping etc.), there is never enough time to spend on cooking as much as you would like to. 


Public holidays are great as not only does it mean that you don’t have to work, it is an opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen.


The best public holidays are the ones where you aren’t required to engage in family commitments like Christmas and Easter, such as Labour Day, Foundation Day and the Queens birthday.

Queen's Birthday

5. Friends

You need guinea pigs to try out your cooking (your dog can only take so much). Friends are suitable for this purpose, ‘real’ guinea pigs do not make great dinner guests and they are unable to provide intelligible constructive criticisms on your food.

Guinea pigs may look pretty cute when consuming your food and you can dress it up but you can’t take them out!

4. Dinner Parties

Once a foodie has honed their cooking skills, it needs to be showcased. Dinner parties are great forum for this. Dinner is the main meal of the day and also the most elaborate meal, where you get to dish up a few courses and be more creative with the menu (in case the entrée or main fail, you can always turn the night around with desert, everyone has a sweet tooth!). 

3. Making things from scratch

When you are learning how to cook, you will want to know how to make things from scratch like pasta, gnocchi, stock, bread, pastry, pizza etc. instead of buying the pre-made stuff from supermarkets. 


Once you master this, you will swear by it. Anything made fresh tastes better but it is also much more time consuming…is it worth it?


Total time to cook packet of pasta bought from supermarket = between 2-12 minutes (depending on the type of pasta).


Total time to cook freshly made pasta = around 67-73 minutes (10 minutes for mixing together the ingredients and kneading the dough, 30 minutes resting time for dough, around 15-20 minutes to roll out dough and cut it, 10 minutes to dry the pasta and 2-3 minutes to cook it in boiling water).


2-12 minutes versus 67-73 minutes! Your friends may think you are insane, considering the fact that nowadays you can buy freshly made pasta from the refrigerated section of the supermarket.


But you will say ‘It’s not the same!’ as you show off your battle wounds.
- bruises from kneading the dough
- strained wrist from winding the handle of the pasta machine
- bandaged wounds from cutting the pasta dough
- burns to your hand from boiling water


As that saying goes “you suffer for your art”…foodies are not an exception to this.

2. Cooking

Everyone has to cook food at some point, as we all need to eat. But cooking for a foodie is not just a part of the routine of life, like brushing your teeth. Cooking is like a hobby or sport for a foodie - something to study and engage in, in our free time. Foodies seek to understand the ingredients used and the proper preparation of food. 


For foodies, cooking offers a creative outlet, a great feeling of accomplishment when a dish has been cooked well, life is better when you are cooking as it allows you to unwind from working for the man and loose yourself in the processes… cooking makes us feel human.  


Any maybe cooking did make us human…


Harvard biological anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, published a book in 2009 called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human which argues that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human, and examines the central role that cooked cuisine has had on the biological and social evolution of humanity.

1. Food

There are only few things that human beings need in order to survive – shelter, water and food. 


Here’s a rough survival guide:
1. Humans cannot survive more than three hours exposed to extremely high or low temperatures.
2. Humans cannot survive more than 3 days without water.
3. Humans cannot survive more than three weeks without food. 


Thus, Food = Life.


But foodies do not just like food as a matter of survival, foodies have an ardent or refined interest in food - they want to learn everything about food and be culinary experts. 

Hi and welcome to Stuff Foodies Like...

I have to confess that this blog was inspired by the likes of Stuff White People Like and Things Bogans Like. I did a search on the internet and found that there is no equivalent blog on foodies (however, I may be wrong, I do not know everything about anything). Foodies like stuff and things too! If white people and bogans can produce more than 100 random points about themselves, then why not foodies?!

So with this blog, I will present to the world – STUFF FOODIES LIKE.

I hope you will enjoy my observations on the subculture of foodies….please take everything with a pinch of salt.

I welcome comments and suggestions :)

A.