Things I've Noticed

Don't Let Bad Versions of a Food Turn You Off to That Food

I was fortunate to grow up in the U.S. as part of a family from another country. That means I was automatically exposed to multiple foods. But back when I was a child in Northeast Ohio, there wasn’t so much ethnic food variety beside Italian food and Chinese food. There were hardly any Thai or Middle-Eastern or Greek restaurants around. Fancy “boutique” fruits and veggies weren’t available fresh and we somehow made do. I grew up eating mostly regular American food interspersed with dinners of Gujarati Indian food. Now that I know how good of a cook my mom is, I should never have complained. As I kid, I may have done so anyway. I preferred chicken nuggets over home-cooked Indian food. My parents policy was that we had to try everything. We did so, (even if accompanied by a chaser of Coca-Cola or orange juice that hid the flavor of foods we found unpalatable.)

Quick Quote on Desserts

"Desserts in the home are a caloric liability."

+ Atul

Celebrating The New Year, Whatever That Means

 

 

Happy New Year to all of you! It’s 2013. Who would have thought we would make it this far? Certainly not the Mayans. But it’s 2013 only in the modern Christian calendar. To the Jews, it’s 5773, to the Hindus, it’s 2069 while in the Muslim Calendar, it’s 1434. And the date the year flips over for other cultures is not January 1st. It is after all, just an arbitrary number that changes on some arbitrary date. What makes the New Year a big deal? When we used to write dates on pieces of paper and checks, accidentally writing the prior year was something that helped make the year changeover a problem. Now, computers fix that stuff for us, even Y2K. We tend to forget that a new year means that it has been 365 days since the earth was in the same spot as today relative to the sun. Our planet has traveled 584,600,600 miles and we are right back where we started 8,760 hours later. Our planet is moving around the sun at 66,671 miles/hour!  The New Year is like a reset button as we repeat the seasons so it makes sense that we track it.  It would probably make more sense to celebrate the New Year at one of the season changeovers.

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You're Not Everybody. You're You.

I’m tired of experts giving rules and guidelines for everybody to follow.  They seem to ignore the fact that I’m not everybody.  I’m me.  And you are you.  And we are all different.  Health advice is the worst offender.  Why should we all drink 8 glasses of water a day when some of us weigh 300 pounds and others weigh 95 pounds?  The “experts” tell all of us not to eat after 8:00 even though they have no idea when we go to sleep.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it supposedly boosts your metabolism to help you lose weight but when I eat a full breakfast, I eat more the rest of the day and I gain weight.  Some fitness trainers think that we should do cardio before weights but how do they know what’s right for each individual person? 

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