I look back at our photos and realize the importance of colors, I am cooking (yes believe it or not Myrto) as I try to explain to some followers, I am not a cook. I feel more comfortable as a bread maker, it is more scientific, I enjoy it more and less pressure.

Yesterday I experimented with colors, I believe that to achieve a good balance you are required to simplify the order of raw materials, divide them into classes, e.g. spices, herbs, etc and think about flavors, colors and extraction. Work from the bottom up, consider the idea of taste, compatibility, technology, temperature and time.

I was also looking at El Bulli cooking, something I rarely if ever do. I ate at El Bulli as a guest several times and had a chance to talk with Ferran but Juli (the founder) was more hospitable and we were much closer.

The idea of El Bulli is not the gut, and that is why so many clients were disappointed. It is the gout, and Ferran would structure his dishes based on techniques and applications of products. He used symbols to identify his products when creating recipes. These pictograms are charts in which icons represent foods to make it easier to understand, building blocks.

The one aspect of El Bulli that was not new but Ferran understood was incorporating into a dish; touch, aromas and texture. So think about it, you are a home chef, you take a recipe and go shopping. You are thinking about recipe and not much else, so how can you be creative. The only way is to re-think your own approach, find a way to experiment and question the recipe.

I discovered that many old cooks secrets are not secrets at all, they are mistakes. The simplest is letting meat sit out before cooking it. I explained yesterday to a chef staying with us; if you let me sit out, it will lose its juices when you cook it. The reason is not complicated, it is simple and is based on atoms and combustion.

Combustion is a chemical process that occurs when oxygen atoms are excited by heat energy and bond rapidly. So think about it, water, heat and combustion and no where to go. If the H2O has no where to go, it escapes the meat and you have a pool of juices.