Trey Massey,
Washington, DC

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Sexiest culinary tool: My hands.

Greatest all-time "success" dish: My one pound caramel ice cream, there is nothing better than turning a spoonful upside down on your tongue, it makes your loins shake.

"Sexiest food": Farmer's Market food. When mother earth gives you her bounty, nothing could be sexier. I find myself aroused when I walk into my market, something changes and surprises me every week. I love the relationship I have with my farmers and the excitement that they bring to my Sunday. If the cook is excited the passion will always transfer to the food.

Peter Shafer,
Ridgefield, WA

Sexiest culinary tool: : My hands (for mixing, touching)

Greatest all-time "success" dish: Incredible Bread (made as she watches without measuring)

"Sexiest food": Bread. While the wine gets all the talk, and the apparent interest and about which is told the lie that it involves all your senses... it doesn't even come close: Your bread making allows you to get stuff on you so it's fine to be touched. A woman gives herself permission to touch your flour "stains" and point them out to you (as if I don't know they're there). If flour is on your nose or cheek, all the better: innocent touches hold the promises of lost innocence to come. A woman will want to taste the bread dough if you taste it first (as part of the preparing process to avoid measuring anything and getting texture right). The texture of dough is intrinsically funny, so that lightens things up. And joking about getting the right texture, and demonstrating you're a man who can detect subtle differences between the way bread dough feels before and after you've added a pinch or two more of flour can really send her imagination places. Let's pause and think about this. Truly. If you play it right. Remember I mentioned "hands" as the sexiest culinary tool... yeah, here's where it all happens. But you have the extra good fortune of involving your tongue as well... and hers... in the kitchen! Come on, how much ammunition could one need!? Then the scent of bread baking while you talk. Ah... It comforts the woman, makes her feel safe enough, which she in fact is, to let her guard down. Almost as if home. The scent, if you've done your homework, leads you to take your lover (for she is by now) by her hand and lead her to your small, not overly impressive (that would be too much) kitchen garden where you discuss the rosemary versus the thyme and allow her to decide on an overall theme of herbs for the dinner. Then you return to finish preparing the main course before her eyes. Again without measuring a damned thing. The qualities which truly separate a Gastrosexual from those who are ultimately found lacking are three things: 1- You KNOW how to cook 2- You LOVE to cook. 3- You have an undying and earnest love for women and all their femininity. You glance never to be rude or approach but only to admire and take in what is presented as the most beautiful creature on this earth. Bread just becomes the centerpiece of everything. You hold it. You listen to the sound of the crust (putting your head next to hers with the bread warm between your two faces and near to her perfume scented ear. Then in that moment of stillness, when you have a perfect reason to be near to each other, comfortable, without moving, listening to silence when you thought you had to make conversation. Then you break it, inhale, and offer her the choicest piece to place next to her main course. And you're both laughing because listening to crust is silly! But placing your head next to a lover is the most important thing in the world when you do it. Touching each other later will be just a continuation of these sensual delights you have already shared; you have an intimacy that wine can only mimic through drunkenness and pseudo intellectual talk that only distances you from your intimate desires.

Iliana Filby,
White River Junction, VT
www.flickr.com/photos/mosaica

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Sexiest culinary tool: The Fork. It's sharp & tantalizingly dangerous, we caress it with our lips, or get the pleasure of feeding the object of our desire delicious titbits.. need I say more?

Greatest all-time "success" dish: It's hard to name one... Here's a lunch I made which I think qualifies though: it was a Japanese inspired dish to celebrate Girl's Day, and, well, it worked. Hamaguri-zushi (sushi rice stuffed into delicate mini-omelettes, salmon balls stuffed with rice and home-made cream cheese, star-fruit, strawberries, asparagus, cucumber salad, umeboshi plum, and passionfruit served in the shell. Mmm!

"Sexiest food": This may seem a bit unlikely, but after many years this still appeals to me as a perfectly aphrodisiac: fresh corn tortillas. The caveat is that you (and preferably your potential sweet-heart) need to make the tortillas yourself, with fresh masa harina. The smell of the fresh dough on your fingers is at once sweet and summery, but also inexplicably sexy and arousing.

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