Food porn par excellence

I have an admission: I'm a foodie. I confess this with reticence, because there are very few things I think is acceptable to be a snob about. I read a lot of restaurant reviews and often cringe as someone goes into pretentious hyperbolic style describing sauces and flavors (I still don't understand how a liquid can have the texture of silk), even those of our own local alt-weekly. I still enjoy just about everything about food, really. Shopping for it, preparing it and of course - eating it. I shun corporate fast food and chains in favor of out of the way places and mom and pop-type joints.

I still rarely, RARELY let my foodie freak flag fly. Because, well, I'm a little ashamed of it. Still, I shop at a small butcher and Asian grocers and cook an average of four days a week - even with my overwhelming schedule. I love to cook. I love to eat. I love to share my food with friends and loved ones.

So are we clear on why this is a big deal I'm passing this website on to you folks? Ok. This didn't come easy ...

I stumbled across this blog via the local TampaBLAB aggregator, and I've been since hooked.

Jaden's Steamy Kitchen is subtitled "Modern Asian Home Cooking," and is chock full of not only great recipes and cooking advice but an enormous amount of humor and personality. I've read a lot of food blogs where either recipes or journaling appear to be the focus, but Jaden actually comes across as a great writer and storyteller.

Enough gushing.

Jaden Hair is an instructor at a cooking school in Sarasota as well as a writer for a few publications. She takes her own photos - which are all quite good and don't employ any tricks of food photography.

She also jokes about sleeping her way through a culinary education with boyfriends of varying cultural backgrounds, and points out the fine points of getting the really good recipes from moms and grandmas and how if you pay to go to cooking school some teacher is just going to show you the tricks taught to them by somebody's mom or grandma anyway. Save the money and have a better time. She has a point there. A lot of my ethnic cooking training has either come directly from families from that area or my own reverse-engineering of food I've had at a restaurant. Left to my own upbringing it would be all fried chicken, greens and casseroles.

Anyway, check her blog out. Just make sure you're not hungry.