About

    This blog is about food and friendship. This is not a restaurant review blog, not a typical recipe blog, but a blog that will follow me (and my friends) for 90 weeks while I cook all the recipes from the book "Le Cordon Bleu At Home". This book provides 90 lessons, each made of multiple courses meal. Each weekend I'll cook one of the lessons (3-4 recipes) to some guinea pig lucky friends.

    There will be many weeks where I won't be able to cook (because of holidays, being sick, or having other commitments), so I expect the 90 lessons to take about 3 years to complete.

    I expect to face many challenges including: finding the appropriate ingredients, buying the appropriate tools, utensils and appliances, and, most importantly, trying to convert words into actions.



About The Book

    Le Cordon Bleu is a famous cooking school in France, probably the most famous of the world. And French food is just delicious because is varied, rich and well-crafted. When we think about French cuisine we usually think some snob upscale restaurant where the food is just an ounce of some weird animal in the middle of a plate. That's just a convenient Hollywood stereotype.

    The book is called "Le Cordon Bleu At Home" and is not your typical cook book. Is not a history of food book, not a technique-only cookbook, and not a recipe book. It's a book that provides more than 300 recipes in 90 lessons (3-4 courses meals). Each lesson teaches you some new technique and some new information about the food you are preparing.

    The book is divided in 3 sections, from Basic to Advanced to Professional.


About Me

    My name is Marcelo Calbucci I'm the founder of an Internet startup called Sampa. Being a geeky at heart French cooking is a perfect match for my style. I'm 30-something and born in Brazil. Until I was 27 years old my cooking skill were limited to frying an egg, mixing some salad or making a hot dog. That is it. But then I moved to the USA to work for Microsoft and after 6 months or so of living here I started missing some Brazilian food. I started by cooking some simple rice, beans and beef dishes and started improving.

    I started to enjoy more and more cooking, and now I don't feel afraid of trying to cook something new.

    I still don't know how to make a lot of dishes, I never make desert, though now I'll have to, I don't bake, and I find it very hard to melt cheese properly (for fondue, of course). Clearly, not all dishes will be right and there will be some panic along the way, but that's what friends are for... To suffer with you eating the un-edible dishes you put together!