Robert Irvine - Mission: Cook!

I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE I AM GOING.

Its not for an immediate lack of direction or information. I am driving to my immediate destination in the middle of the night from an appearance at a live cooking event in Morristown, New Jersey. I am driving a sleek new BMW with a technologically advanced GPS system, into which I have fed the coordinates for a hotel in Princeton. In the short term, I think I am probably quite close to that locale. I am hoping to get some food and at least a few hours rest before the big day tomorrow. Therein lies the mystery.

Tomorrow, I am due to arrive at an undisclosed destination, where I will be cooking for an indeterminate number of people I have never met, in a kitchen I have never seen, with stores of food and ingredients that may or may not be of my choosing. I have no idea how long I will be given to accomplish this task, nor will I have any prior ability to plan ahead in even the smallest detail. And I have willinglyno, eagerly, placed myself in this predicament.

There is only one force that could be responsible for devising such an absurd situation with such a markedly high potential for disaster: television.

Tomorrow is the day I am shooting the pilot for my first (hopefully successful, hopefully the first of many, fingers crossed) Food Network show. Each episode of the show will feature your humble servant, me, ably assisted (most of the time at least, God and my sadistic producers willing) by my incredible souschefs, George and George, in equally absurd and improbable cooking situations, with no advance warning or information ahead of the game as to where, how, for whom, and with what we might be cooking at any given time.

Pretty cool, huh?

I am not inherently of an existential bent, but its hard to avoid a certain level of reflection on ones life when a benchmark for a long-sought and cherished goal such as this has been reached.

As you will see in the succeeding pages, I am a bit of an anomaly in the cooking trade. Although I have a wide-ranging acquaintance with classical technique and world cuisine, I have never been to a formal culinary institute or cooking school. I am equally at home cooking for six people at a time as I am for six thousand, and I discovered that ability within myself whilst I was still in my teens. I have cooked an inordinate proportion of meals in my career on the ocean. I have had the privilege of cooking for royalty, celebrities, politicians, and ambassadors of high rank, diners of every stripe, but unlike, say, Thomas Keller and his most admirable French Laundry, I have neveryetestablished a single restaurant kitchen as my home base.

In more than a quarter-century of cooking, I have never settled down, professionally speaking anyway. Not unlike the freelancers of medieval European chivalry or cowboys for hire on the open range in the American West, I have preferred to follow my own path, my own internal compass. I have never liked being constrained within a single system or style of cooking, and I have always looked to the next horizon for opportunity and inspiration.

I am very good at drawing up strategies and attacking problems, but in general, I dont like plans. Blueprints, manuals, corporate directives, and even recipes essentially leave me cold. I have collected cookbooks from about the age of eleven, and have always enjoyed studying the pictures and figuring my own methods for achieving a dish more than slavishly following every measurement and cooking time listed by the author.

I believe that cooking can be a demonstration of what you have inside of you, whether you are a chef expressing a passion for exquisite culinary detail, a cook dishing up hearty and delicious fare in a diner to fuel your customers for the day ahead, or a mother expressing love and caring for her family at the dinner table. I believe that these feelings are best expressed in the moment.

I have created a lot of dishes with which I am quite pleased, that reflect my basic philosophies of how to put a dish together. I try to use fresh and interesting ingredients, to incorporate the element of surprise, ofttimes by combining hot and cold items on the same plate, by pairing unusual textures, by building the dish on the plate in a new and interesting way, all without sacrificing the integrity of the whole. But however well practiced and well calculated a dish might be, I know that I will never make it the exactly the same way twice. I may find a novel ingredient whilst passing a market on the way to the event and throw it into the mix; I may be in a bad mood and thus decide to approach the same old dish in a new and playful way to cheer myself up; it may be rainy, or sunny, or Christmasyall of these will affect the way I cook on the day. If I know my audience personally, it changes the plan of attack I might use for an anonymous crowd. If I make a dish tomorrow instead of today, well, that changes everything.

The more open you are to the world and its infinite variety of people and influences, the more they will spill into and around your life. This television opportunity came from totally unexpected sources, and I find myself relishing this next challenge, because, in fact, it suits me. I probably would not have purposely chosen a format in which I will never have any idea what might be coming at me next, but I can already see that it is going to test me and my particular theories about cooking and life in ways that could prove deeply satisfying (if I dont screw up too much). Though I dont believe in recklessness, which carries its own punishments, I do believe that spontaneity is its own reward. One of the biggest rewards is creative satisfaction. The biggest, in my opinion? It makes things a lot more fun.

I also believe in sharing what I have learned; thus this book. There are stories contained herein about how I got to where I am, collaborations and conversations about how to approach and think about the subject of food, and recipes that I think and hope you will enjoy. Make them if they appeal to you, see how they work, and then, please take the liberty of making them your own and using them as a jumping-off point for inspiration. Some of these recipes apply directly to the stories in this book; some of them demonstrate certain qualities that are valuable to the study and discussion of food; some go together thematically, some dont; some are just in there because theyre good and I thought you might like to give them a try.

A good chef knows how to set the tone for a meal by provoking interest with a taste of things to come that illustrates, ideally, what his cuisine is all about in a single bite or two. The amuse-gueule, which literally is an amusement for the mouth, is a very small chefs tasting, offered upon seating, of a preparation that is exotic, surprising, or special, to prime the palate for what is to come. The amuse-gueule can tell you a lot about the chef and about what he is preparing to set before you. Seems like a good way to start a book, too.