I have spent nearly a decade traveling the globe, poking my nose into chef’s kitchens, extracting recipes, and pretending to eat daintily, all the while accompanied by a TV camera focusing its irksome lens up close and personal. There was a world of cuisines to taste and cultures waiting to be discovered, my radar was zeroing in on the nutritional content of what was cooking.

I added a doctor to the show, and the tango between chef, doctor and anchor became a terrific learning ground. The kitchen became a lab – lots of research on ingredients, their origin, their ‘goodness’ or lack of it; new permutations and combinations emerged, the taste buds exploded, and then, with a mixture of excitement and abandonment, magic was created.