Kylie makes cabbage look alluring. Kylie works saucepans like she’s at a DJ console. Kylie makes chopping carrots look glamorous.

Not surprisingly, her show, “Kylie Kwong: Cooking with Heart And Soul” has succeeded in inspiring couch-potatoes around the world to get their aprons on. It has deepened the all-pervasive fascination for Chinese food. And, triggered vociferously friendly Internet discussions on everything from her recipes to her chipper personality.

Reassuringly, she sounds just as chirpy over the phone, calling from Sydney, in a conversation with MetroPlus about her show “My China”, on Discovery Travel and Living.

“We wanted to create much more than a cooking show,” she says, “People respond to raw emotion.” Kylie adds that it’s easy for her to connect with the audience since she really believes in what she’s talking about. “I’m not an actor. I can’t pretend,” she says. “What I can do is get in front of the TV and tell the world how much I love Chinese food…”

Besides, she states she’s inspired when she discusses subjects she loves: “I never stop. I’d drive you mad,” she laughs.

Since most of the world has had an enduring affair with Chinese food, “My China” is a logical follow-up to “Cooking With Heart And Soul”, which showed Kylie recreating classical Chinese recipes, many learnt from her mother, in her slick kitchen. But because, she is a professional chef, her techniques are more sophisticated than rustic, and her results look like glossy advertisements from a gourmet magazine.

Her restaurant, Billy Kwong, has 60 dishes on the menu, all of which are based on traditional Chinese recipes. “The difference is in the quality of the produce I use. I use organic vegetables. No chemicals. No MSG, or oyster sauce out of a bottle. If I want plum sauce, I make it out of fresh plums.” (Following Kylie’s beliefs, Billy Kwong aims to “to leave as small and light an environmental footprint as possible, to give back to the community whenever and wherever we can, and to think globally and act locally.”)

This show includes, what Kylie calls, “travel, history and raw emotion…” since it covers her travelling through China, reconnecting with her roots. A fourth generation Australian, she’s calls herself a 29th generation Kwong. “But, I felt connected with China when I visited.”

The series opens with her visiting her family’s ancestral village in Toishan. “I’m nearly 40 now…, she says, talking of how important the homecoming was to her. “It was amazing, very emotional. I felt like I was returning to the clan… It was very primeval.”

For additional colour, there’s Kylie’s great grandfather, who seems like quite an interesting character. “My great grandfather moved to Australia during the gold rush. He had four Chinese wives, and 24 children.” Kylie’s grand return included a visit to her grandfather’s house (It’s still there!) and spending quality time with her long lost Chinese relatives. “They spoke no English, and I speak no Cantonese or Mandarin.” But, they communicated. “We cooked for each other. We laughed. We ate.”

This show’s about more than making a perfect bowl of noodles. “You can call it a cooking and travelling show. Nine episodes. Nine different provinces,” she says talking of how they have tried to show how the physical landscape and geography of each place. “The physical look of the local fare. The local market — because that is really what says everything about the local community… It’s very textured. Far more than just a pretty cooking show.”

Do fudge brownies gobbled with your head in the fridge count? After all, if nobody sees you, it’s okay to discount the calories, right?

Sigh. Not anymore. Thanks to Twitter (the micro-blogging service that’s captivating much of the online world) and the kaleidoscope of imaginative applications it’s inspiring, it’s becoming next to impossible to live your life under a veil of convenient secrecy.

While Twitter might be dramatically revolutionising business, politics and pop culture by changing the way people share information, it’s also creating all kinds of upheavals in the world of food.

One genre of applications are changing the way people cook, dine out and eat by enabling users from the across the world to share pictures and information on their every meal. Since twitter is so democratic, it means that anyone anywhere can post a picture of anything they want anytime. Which — as you can imagine — leaves a lot of room for experimentation, pushing boundaries and plain goofing off.

An application like Nom.ms, for instance, which encourages users to tweet pictures and a couple of lines of text on every thing they eat is fascinating for so many reasons. The most obvious, of course, is that for foodies it’s a fun way to learn about food, ingredients and recipes, by seeing how people around the world eat. User Trendy, for instance, had Angel hair pasta with tomato sauce for dinner. She cooked it with red banana peppers, onions, green beans and shrimp. She’s also addicted to what she calls the ‘Everything but the kitchen sink cookies’ — “My dad gets ‘em from the farmers’ market — they’re amazing. Oatmeal, milk and white chocolate, macadamia nuts, walnuts, raisins…” Talk about getting a real, unbeatably immediate and artlessly evocative slice of life!

Of course there’s the danger of getting overly inspired, and eating your way into an obnoxiously large pair of jeans. Enter TweetWhatYouEat.com (TWYE), an inventive way to keep yourself honest using the convenience of twitter. Which brings us back to you brazenly scoffing fudge brownies with your head in the fridge. (Yes, I’m talking to you.)

An online food diary, TWYE, enables you to enter everything you eat instantly, making it extremely difficult to cheat. Alex Ressi, founder and lead developer of the application, says the site has more than 8,000 followers, 30 per cent of whom post regularly. He says that it’s the accessibility of twitter, “being able to post updates from your IM, mobile phone or the web,” that drew him to the platform.

To make calorie counting easier, the application even has a ‘CrowdCal system’. Alex says this is the Internet’s first completely crowd-sourced calorie database. When active, it auto-fills food entries with the appropriate calorie value based on what other users in the community have entered. It’s an ingenious way to cover a huge variety of foods from every country.

Of course, since this is twitter, the biggest impetus comes from the community. People clearly find it easier to diet with a supportive group — even if it consists of people across the world who they’ve never met. The forum is alive with everything from cries of help (“pineapple upside-down cake. Anyone has alternatives?”) to shrieks of despair. (“I’m sorry — but there is NO SUBSTITUTION for McDonald’s Medium French Fries when you’re stressed!”)

“People need to be able to share in their success and lean on others,” says Alex, adding that they’ve had some inspiring weight loss stories. “I’ve had people write in and share stories about 20 pound, 40 pound and the most dramatic — a 70 pound weight loss using the Tweet What You Eat tool and working in conjunction with a nutritionist.”

Besides, it’s encouraging to feel that you’re not the only one with so little self-control. Take “Heyimskye” whose bio states she’s “losin weight one fat cell at a time.” She began yesterday with “salad with romaine lettuce.” A little later comes the entry: “mini muffin you will be the death of me!”

Now where’s that fudge brownie?

Mustard oil is good. Mustard oil is bad. Coconut oil is dreadful. Coconut oil is fantastic. Olive oil, on the other hand, is consistently virtuous. Apparently, it will fix your heart, make you thin, heal your family and walk your dog.

It’s astonishing how vociferous health gurus can get about cooking oil brands. Much of the hysteria is dedicated to making sinners and saints out of various blameless oils. Take mustard oil, loved by Bengalis for its intense, almost nutty flavour. Till popular opinion decreed that everyone should stop using it because it’s bad for the heart. Then came the discovery that it’s rich in omega-3 and antioxidants, which made it good for your body.

Confused? Well, that’s nothing compared to the coconut oil saga. For decades Malayalis happily fried everything in the fragrant, rich oil. Then, talk of saturated fats started doing the rounds, and suddenly it became the symbol for all that is perceived to be unhealthy about desi cooking. (Though one look at the old and vigorous Ayurvedic practitioners brought up on a steady diet of asli ghee, full-fat milk and coconut oil easily proves otherwise.) Till very recently, cooking with coconut oil was guaranteed to make most people recoil in horror. Now suddenly there’s a buzz about virgin coconut oil and all its fabulous benefits. This version of the oil (extracted from fresh coconuts and processed with no chemicals) is said to — believe it or not — actually boost your metabolism.

However, the popularly-acknowledged kingpin of all healthy oils is olive oil. If all the muscle behind its marketing is to be believed, it’s the panacea for all ills. It prevents heart disease. Lowers cholesterol. Virgin olive oil has a strong antioxidant effect, protecting against free radicals and the formation of cancer.

While it is true that olive oil is one of the healthiest of oils, it’s certainly not a complete solution. Every gram of oil — regardless of what kind of oil it is — contains nine calories. Which means one tablespoon is roughly 120 calories. What you really need to do to get healthy is reduce your intake of oil. Weight loss and health, unfortunately, all boil down to that same old mantra: fewer calories, more exercise.

The biggest problem with olive oil is that it is far more expensive than any of the other oils available in the Indian market. Honestly, if you can’t afford it, that’s alright. The truth is, as all our grandmothers have always known; there are plenty of other options. Try alternating between oils like refined peanut, rice bran, corn, gingelly and sunflower, just to name a few. Nutritionists now recommend consuming a mix of about three kinds of oils as each provides you with different essential fatty acids.

The second big hitch is that Indians feel olive oil’s flavours don’t work with Indian food. That’s probably true with dishes where the oil is a main component of the flavour, like the Bengali mashed potatoes with mustard oil or Kerala avial, which is topped with a spoon of sizzling coconut oil. But with a number of regular Indian dishes it actually works reasonably well.

Celebrity adman Prahlad Kakkar, a self-confessed “man of great excesses,” is an enthusiastic promoter of olive oil. On a cooking demonstration, which was part of a road show organised by the International Olive Council, he said “When you warm brandy, you release its secrets. It’s the same with a good olive oil: it’s fruity, it’s pure, you know it’s good for you because it lingers.” As he sautéed onions and garlic for baingan bhartha, their delicious aromas filled the room. “Olive oil’s like pure desi ghee,” he said, “It makes you remember home.”

Even if you don’t come from Spain, apparently.

Cross-legged attack on Wazwan. Our quick mid-kebab pose for the camera.

Singing and spinach make for a charming, if unlikely, combination.

It’s a bracingly cool morning in Srinagar, where we’re attending a friend’s wedding. We’re cross-legged on the lawn helping her aunts and grand-aunt de-stalk crackly-fresh spinach leaves for the wedding lunch. As the community unites, from different parts of the country or city — which involves braving bandhs, curfews and random stone-pelting — to celebrate, preparations to feed about a thousand people are already in full swing.

The women sit in a circle singing beguiling folk songs, steadily working their way through baskets piled high with the leaves. All the while, a kahwa lady hands out cup after cup of the soothing sweet green tea, fragrant with saffron, spiced with cardamom and afloat with crisp almond slivers, from a silver samovar, which bubbles ceaselessly through the three-day-wedding thanks to cleverly concealed cavities holding glowing charcoal. Beside it, there’s a basket of tandoor-baked soft Kashmiri bread from down the road for breakfast. It’s necessarily light. After all, everyone’s gearing up for wazwan — an elaborate, formal, overwhelmingly generous meal integral to Kashmiri Muslim weddings.

A huge tent has been set up next door to the house for the preparation of this meal, which is served for lunch and dinner through the wedding and features anything from 20 to 44 different courses — most of them meat, mainly mutton. The mathematics is precise and has to be adhered to, following tradition. Shahid Mir, brother of the bride Shaila, explains it, as he walks us around the quaint kitchen-tent, which bustles with activity — hoards of oversized furiously bubbling pots, crackling wood-fires and about ten cooks preparing the meal with the kind of regimental precision, poise and co-ordination that can only come from having done this hundreds of times before.

“For thousand people, they use 120 goats,” he says, “and about 1,100 chickens.” Wazwan is served in huge plates, each of which is shared by four people. “Every plate holds around 4 to 5 kilos of meat.” The brilliance of the cook really comes into play here, because every dish tastes distinctly different. Like the conductor of an orchestra, the head cook directs and guides the team. With minimal talk, responsibilities are divided. One group cuts the meat, ensuring it’s halal. The next lot sits in a row, pounding endlessly to tenderise it. The steady thud’s rhythm is surprisingly cohesive with the folk songs, also sung through the wedding. Another group does the blending, boiling and frying.

With 24 courses on the day of the wedding, this is — of course – far more than most people can comfortably eat. However following long-established protocol handed down through generations, Kashmiri families ensure that there’s no reduction whatsoever in the amount of food served.

After we grapple helplessly with a couple of meals, wasting embarrassing quantities, Shahid’s mom Shamima explains the mystery of how the rest of the wedding guests seem to be clearing their plates. It’s a delightfully practical solution. To really enjoy the nuances and flavours of every course, guests are given bags, so they can just pack up the excess food and take it home.

As the tempting scents of smoky kebabs, spice-laden curries and smoking-hot ghee begin to weave their way across the garden, we sit down for our first wazwan experience. The boys in the family do all the carrying and serving, so one of the cousins sets down the tash-t-nari, a quaint silver basin accompanied by a jug straight out of Arabian nights so we can wash our hands. Then comes the plate, piled high with rice, topped with a dash of cooked spinach curry and a dense, meaty gravy made with lamb liver, kidney and intestines.

Then, the wazwan starts moving faster. Scalding chicken red curry served with a huge ladle is carefully poured on the rice, along with a huge meaty piece of chicken for each of the four people sitting around the plate. Then come the tender sheek kebabs. Rogan josh, fiery with red Kashmiri chillies. The delicious tabak maz, which are flat rib cuts cooked in spiced milk and then fried in pure ghee till they’re dark and crackling. Delectably spongy paneer in a rich tomato sauce. Gushtaba, soft mutton meatballs cooked in a gravy of fresh curd, end the meal.

Not surprisingly we loll about like pythons once we’re done. More kawah. More singing. The thudding from the tent begins again. After all, there’s wazwan for dinner.