Things I've Noticed

Unusual Food Flavor Combinations

I’m addicted to food.  I eat every day and more than 3 times a day on most days.  So, I think about food all the time and I get a hunger for it.  Of course, like any other person, I like to eat things that taste good (to me).  I’ve grown to like a variety of things and will eat almost anything that’s vegetarian with few restrictions.  I also like to try new things in food whether it’s a new restaurant, new ethnicity of food, or just a new menu item.  It’s a way of getting a minor sense of adventure out of daily life.  It’s funny when people like to eat only what they know they already like.  At some point, they had to try what they like for the first time.  My mom always says, “how do you know you don’t like it until you try.”  But then she attempts to get me to “try” the same dish multiple times over the years even if I didn’t like it the first few times.  I stopped falling for that.

What I have noticed about food is that some of the true food pioneers and chefs have created great-tasting flavor combinations from seemingly incompatible flavors that make no sense.  I wonder why somebody tried putting ingredients such as these together in the first place…

- lemon/poppy seed
- chocolate/habanero
- cranberries/gorgonzola cheese
- pineapple/pizza
- chocolate/peanutbutter
- mango/tomatoes (in salsa)
- fruit/balsamic vinegar
- cookie dough/ice cream
- chocolate/mint
- peanut butter/banana

The people ran the risk of wasting food if the new combo tasted horrible.  And the really bold ones tried out these crazy food combinations on their friends and family.  They must have really valued experimentation over their relationships.  But if the experiments turned out well, they may have gained more friends or more business in the case of restaurants or food producers.  Perhaps in times of scarcity, people combined random ingredients for variety.  Who wants to eat the same three things every week?  But if you combine two ingredients at a time in a unique way, you get many possibilities.

We take these combinations of food for granted, but we should thank the crazy food pioneers who tried them out in the first place.  I regularly enjoy lemon/poppyseed muffins and cranberry/almond/gorgonzola on my salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing, (thanks to Zoup! where I got the idea).  Once, I had an avocado/mint/rosewater dessert which was absolutely amazing.  A traditional Gujarati Indian recipe that I like combines pomegranate seeds, fried lentil seeds, onions, cilantro, and cayenne pepper powder.  Who would have thought to combine lentil seeds with pomegranate?  They’re both seeds but they are strange bowlfellows indeed. 

What are some of your favorite seemingly weird food flavor combinations?  Are there any that you’ve created? 

+ Atul

Right-sized Ingredients: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

I’ve written about various other annoying food traditions, (such as only getting one napkin at dinner), but there’s another one that continually bothers me, and sometimes it can embarrass me.  My mouth is a normal human mouth and when I eat food, I take a bite and chew just like the next guy.  What I don’t understand is when I go to the restaurant, why is it that my food comes with pieces of ingredients that are impossible to eat properly?  I buy spaghetti and the pieces are too big to ingest in one bite, are difficult to cut or twirl completely onto a fork.  I know it’s tradition, but why not make spaghetti shorter?  OK, that would be blasphemous so let’s leave spaghetti alone.  Let’s focus on sandwiches then.  When I get a sandwich, the portabella mushroom are so large that and incomplete bite causes the whole piece to slide out of the sandwich, usually onto my lap.  For large leaves of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, it’s all the same story.  If you’re lucky, they stay on your plate and you can try to reassemble the sandwich the way it was meant to be, but it never ends up right.  Or you could eat those ingredient bits later with utensils, but that makes you look exceedingly hungry.  Add sauce or marinade to the sandwich and it’s an even bigger mess.  Then you really need more than one napkin.

Salads are no better.  How am I supposed to cut the lettuce on a fluffy pile of other veggies?  Large onion pieces often end up hanging half out of your mouth.  Dressing makes it more difficult and then chickpeas, croutons, and all those other little ingredients come along with the lettuce for a ride, usually ending up on the lap of the person next to me. 

I propose that we right-size the pieces of ingredients we include in salads and sandwiches.  Not too big, not too small, just right.  How about bite-sized?  What a concept.  If you can’t stab it with a fork, make it spoonable.  I’m sure it will take more work in the back kitchen, but we usually pay a lot of mark-up for food at restaurants anyway.  And home cooking won’t require too much extra effort.  I just can’t start cutting my sandwiches into little pieces.  That would be a solution more embarrassing than the problem.

+ Atul

Quick Quote on Salsa

"You can never eat too much salsa."

+ Atul

Quick Quote on Food

"The more I eat, the more I eat."

+ Atul

Treasured Junk Food

John Sadowski, a recent addition to the Roundtable clan has put up his first Roundtable post.  It's about food you love to eat but shouldn't.  Which diet-busters keep you from losing those last 10 pounds?  I listed mine in a comment on his blog (although I forgot to mention Coca-Cola as something I drink too much of).  Drive through John's blog and share your order.

+ Atul

Help Create The Real Food Pyramid

The vivacious Sereena is up for this week's roundtable and she's thinking shapes and she's thinking food.  She wants you to help create the new food pyramid since the USDA doesn't know what it's talking about.  I told her  it needs to have masala in it and she told us it all must start with chocolate.  Have a visit to Sereena's Roundtable Blogpost during the public comment period.  When she gets enough input, she is going to make a graphic of the new Metahpor Voodoo Food Pyramid on her blog, one that will presumably be suitable for framing.

Hurry, you're running out of time to make suggestions since I'm posting this a day late.  We have airlines and their delays to thank for that.

+ Atul

Anti-Vegetarianism Revisited

So, after I posted a prior article on Anti-Vegetariansim, I received an alarming number of hits to "Things I've Noticed" from searches on terms having to do with being against vegetarianism.  Some even searched on that stupid famous quote, "Vegetarian: Indian word for bad hunter." to get here.

I have a couple of good responses to that one...

"Hunter: English word for a person dumb enough to run around chasing food."
"Save a deer.  Shoot a hunter."

+ Atul

Anti Vegetarianism

This issue is near and dear to me as a 16 year vegetarian.  It's 2006 and we still have to put up with a lot of flack just for the fact that we choose not to eat dead animals.  We've heard them all, (and they're all quite lame)...

- "What do you eat? Lettuce?"
- "You're pretty big for a vegetarian."
- "How about you have this big juicy steak."
- "So you can't even eat seafood?"
- "Vegetarian: Indian word for bad hunter."

Of course, I have comebacks for most of these, but they may be offensive so I won't list them.  The real question is this:  Why is it that some meat-eating people feel so threatened or offended by the fact that we don't eat meat?  If anything, it's more meat for them.  Perhaps it's just not "normal" to be vegetarian.  Or maybe it threatens their cultural heritage or their industries.  One of the many famous vegetarians, K.D. Lang even had her songs taken off the air in her native province of Alberta which is a big beef producing area.  Are they scared of us?  Do they think we're weak because we don't like to make animals suffer?  If anything, we're smart for eating food that is generally healthier, doesn't require defrosting, and makes meal choices at restaurants easier and cheaper.  I won't get into the philosophical aspects. 

And why do food producers do so little to cater to us?  According to Wikipedia which references http://www.vrg.org/journal/vj2000may/2000maypoll.htm, approximately 3% of the population is vegetarian.  That's quite a niche market if you ask me.  Food producers often tell you if food is kosher, why not tell us if something is vegetarian so that we don't have to read food labels closely?  I propose the following code for all food producers to put on their labeling...

V - vegan
OV - ovovegetarian (contains eggs)
LV - lactovegetarian (contains dairy)
OLV - ovolactovegetarian (contains eggs and dairy)

(Props to places like almost every ethnic restaurant, Trader Joe's, Burger King, Taco Bell for offering veggie options.)

Now if only airlines would bring back vegetarian meals, then I could fly without starving.  Wait a second, they need to bring back meals in general first.

+ Atul