So the first leg of my trip was a planned stop in LA to visit my long time friend Emily and her husband, JP. Jp and Emily both work in the “the business” and are currently working on a pilot to give to a couple tv networks. Its an interesting cooking show called “Big Chef, Little kitchen” where Big Mario (as I call him) comes to the rescue of a damsel in distress. The kitchens are small and Mario is huge! I’m talking 6′-6″ 260lbs of huge. 

Well for this pilot, they are shooting in Emily and JPs kitchen, so yesterday Mario came over to do a test run. Luckily, I was here for some test eating! We went over the menu and went to the grocery store for some ingredients. Even though there were no cameras rolling, it felt completly like I was on food network.

We drank some beer and Mario began cooking. He dice, peeled, chopped and sliced his way through the onions, potatos, mushrooms, and garlic like the Shogun Assassin slicing through ninjas. Within minutes, the prep work was done and the shrooms, garlic and onion started sauteeing in some olive oil along with some S&p.  The potatos were boiling already and he began to whip up some garlic cream for the roasted garlic mash potatos. The aromas quickly filled the kitchen and I immediately started to drool which is odd because I’ve never been a mushroom fan but it lookedand smelled so good my fungi inhibitions were immediately discarded.

Big Mario cut a hole in the chicken rather than butterflying it which was cool and he stuffed the mixture that was satueeing inside of the breasts.
The chicken cooked for a few minutes and it wasn’t long before I was waiting, fork in hand, for the food to be plated.

The presentation was very nice and I took some pictures with my digicam so they could have some good quality stills to play with, ill upload those later.

I snapped this picture with my iPhone after we picked the first plate clean. It was a modified stuffed Marsala chicken with roasted garlic mashed potatoes and esparagus (which I’m still not a fan of). Oh and I almost forgot the romaine salad with a fresh balsamic something, also very good!

The work-related convo picked up and emily and I secretly worked on cleaning the second plate while everyone was distracting each other with questions of what to wear and say. I’m going to totally try and recreate that dish, it didn’t seem toohard and it was delicious, fungi and all.

We popped open a bottle of wine and ordered some Thai food, (since I won’t get enough this next month ) and chatted away the rest of the night. It was a great time and I can’t wait to see the show on tv, unfortunately I will be gone before the final shooting but I dont think it will top the experience of last night.

Great start to my trip and I’m still only in the US!

*as a side note, Emily and I realized we’ve known each other for 17years now, all the way back to 6th grade!