Anthony Sedlak – The Guy can Cook!

So my friend Debi and I went to a cooking class last night at the local gourmet gadget store, Kitchen Therapy, and we had the most amazing, head spinning, appetite conquering, mind boggling, culinary adventure anyone can have in an urban plaza that also sports a Le Chateau!  Just mere steps from the H&M store, across from a Hallmark  Cards shop, none other than the gorgeous gourmand himself, Anthony Sedlak was stirring up a savoury storm on an uncharacteristically stormy night.  At exactly the moment he flung another handful of coarse salt into the Bolognese sauce, the lights went out with a thunderous BAM!  It was as if he was channeling Emeril Lagasse and announcing his presence in the suburbs with a perfectly timed bolt of lightning.
Anthony Sedlak, is of course, right up there with the likes of Lagasse and other pop-culture TV chefs.  His show The Main on the Food Network, has people from all walks of life and all culinary backgrounds tuning in to watch his incredible physique……I mean, finesse with all things gourmet.  He’s a local boy (BC) and he’s made himself a name in the clique of cookbook gurus.  I now have Gordon, Jamie, Joel and Anthony’s names prominently displayed in my collection of kitchen counter cookbooks. I have had the good fortune to dine at Gordon, Jamie and Joel’s famous restaurants, but I’ve never had the joy of personally watching them cook!

Sitting just a few feet away from Anthony’s “cooking stage” at the back of the incredibly stocked kitchen store, my 11 classmates and I watched and listened as Anthony flung ingredients by the handful into simmering pots on the cooktop in the demonstration kitchen.  He created the three course meal with more joie de vivre than the small space could actually handle and there were times when I threw my head back at the sheer power of his culinary conviction.
A few times he mentioned his penchant for Red Bull, which made me wince at the thought.  He also confessed to having a “quarter life crisis”, which made my menopausal friends and I feel ancient.  He let it slip, perhaps in jest, that he suffers from OCD, but more than once, I wondered if he had a hyper-sensitivity to everything in his environment like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, when he’d nervously bat at invisible specs in the air around him.  The energy coming off Anthony Sedlak when he’s wearing an apron and stirring a pot almost makes the gas burner redundant.
This chef is all about rustic cooking, local ingredients, simple recipes, long slow cooking and the not-so-delicate balance of the savoury and the sweet.
I found it kind of difficult to keep up with the way he peppered cooking instructions with philosophical quotations and personal life stories.  A psychiatrist would have a field day with this guy! Who casually drops Margaret Mead quotations into a cooking lesson?  ”So that’s 2 litres of Beef stock….A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has….and a couple of dried bay leaves”….  
There are two things you notice when you encounter Anthony Sedlak in person: 1) he’s really good looking and 2) he’s super hyper.  These are things you notice as opposed to things you already know.  He’s an accomplished and internationally recognized chef and he has a Food Network cooking show.  At first, I thought he would be a great catch for my daughter.  She loves writing about food and he loves making food.  What could be better?  So the first question asked from the cooking class assembled in the back of the store was “Are you single?”.  And I wasn’t the one who asked it!  Anthony mumbled something vague as we all felt a bit of crowd embarrassment and then he jokingly answered “If we’re not in North Van, then yes!”  I was a little less enthusiastic at that point on the idea of my daughter dating him.  In fact, as the evening wore on, I grew less infatuated with him and more worried about his mental state.  Every time he flicked the back of his neck and rubbed his jeans with his hands, I thought of Rain Man or that Sam character Sean Penn played in I am Sam!. But I guess genius in all its creative forms comes with a bit of quirkiness.  
Back to the good looking thing.  Anthony tried to explain “pork belly” by rubbing his own belly, which is the area now occupied by his rock hard abs. Nobody, even the guys, could concentrate after that.  He mentioned the fact that he’d gained some weight during his Michelin 3-star restaurant days, but his 8-10K daily runs and his 80 -100k three-times-a-week bike marathons have turned him into a lean mean cooking machine.  I think you could make fudge on the guy’s marble slab torso. One of my classmates even asked, “how can you stay so trim eating food like this?”  That’s when Anthony mentioned the Olympic athlete fitness regime he’s got going.  
Let’s just say that I loved his laissez faire attitude to cooking. The French phrase literally means, “allow to do”, and it is basically the way I love to cook.  Whatever ingredients I have on hand, whatever I feel like tossing together, often outdoes the precisely planned concoctions every time.  In our house we call it “A Taste of the Fridge” and it is a fantastic adventure to embark on! 
I don’t want to be Anthony Sedlak’s mother-in-law, but I wouldn’t mind if he came over to cook once in awhile!