What don't you eat? (How to feed anyone)

I was out for dinner with a friend last night and she wouldn't eat the squid in her seafood dish. Nothing wrong with that - we all have things we don't like - but it, combined with reading through the latest post on Smitten Kitchen in a vain attempt to stave off the cravings induced by StumbleUpon being down today, made be think about the subject.

Which is not to say it made me think coherently about the subject. It is a saturday morning. So the following is more of a brain dump than a well thought out argument. Also it contains no cooking. If you were hoping for a recipe accompanied my fun filled antics and tomfoolery in the kitchen, you might want to give up and go back to bed now.

I think I'm pretty open minded about food. I'll eat most things, within the restriction that I only eat a restricted subset of meats. I don't eat Okra if I can avoid it (it's the devil's vegetable), and I don't drink wine or beer, but that's about it. I also don't eat bad food, but that's a separate issue related to me being a snob rather than food related. :-) On the other hand, I used to not eat dairy either, so I'm reasonably familiar with the difficulties of working on a restricted diet.

I know a lot of other people who are very fussy eaters, either by nature, moral choice or medical neccessity. Amongst my friends and family we have nut allergies, dairy intolerance, gluten intolerance. One of my friends can't eat sweet peppers. Moral choice is more obvious - I know quite a few vegetarians of varying degrees and lived with a vegan friend for somewhat over a year.

Then there are people who have things which they just don't like to eat (and things who have people whom they just don't like to eat, but that's a separate post). Some of my friends basically don't eat vegetables, or don't like specific vegetables. Mushrooms seem to be the fungi which everyone loves to hate. My brother's girlfriend doesn't eat anything which is purple.

There's a tendency to roll one's eyes and tell them to stop being so fussy. I'm certainly guilty of it (but then I'm judgmental and horrible. Ask anyone).

To some extent this is warranted - I can't imagine not eating most vegetables, and I find it amazingly difficult to accommodate people don't. But part of that is just me - I'm sure if I stuck a great big slab of bacon on their plate they'd be happy as a pig in... ok, bad metaphor. But you get the point. I'm sure they'd find it similarly difficult to feed me.

On the other hand, maybe we should think of restrictions as opportunities. In my presentation on vegan cooking I mentioned that there are basically two secrets to good vegan cooking: Variety and proper use of spices. Neither of these are particularly vegan centric - they're just things which happen to be especially important for vegan cooking. Once you've learned them you can port them to any other style of cooking you like, and you'll be a better cook for it.

I'm sure other genres of cooking are the same. In cutting something out of the mix you will expose limitations to your cooking style which its presence has helped to cover up and, in learning to deal with these limitations, you will become a better cook for it.

So. What don't you eat?

What do you eat? (How to feed a vegan)

I've just given a talk at work entitled "What do you eat? (How to feed a vegan)". (It was part of our training on giving presentations). Just thought I'd post a copy of the slides.

They're probably not the most enthralling thing in the world if you weren't attending the presentation (which was, of course, fantastic), but some people might find them interesting.

Guacamole and playing with new toys

Gosh? Is this thing still here? I suppose I'd better post something to it then. :-)

I've been lacking the energy to play recently, but some new kitchen toys and a renewed attempt at acquiring the energy may result in more posts in the near future.

Yesterday I had a problem. Two problems in fact.

1) My kitchen was resplendent with several exciting new sharp implements (Remember: A well armed kitchen is a polite kitchen) which were not being used. Not least among these was a food processor with more attachments than your average Swiss army.
2) For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, I had an awful lot of avocado which were getting very ripe.

Obvious conclusion: Guacamole!

Now, I was far from my cookbooks (ok, I was 5 minutes walk from my cookbooks, but I was in Sainsburys and they weren't), and I've never made guacamole before in my life. What to do, what to do... Enterprising young chef that I am, I hit upon a cunning plan.

Ok, it wasn't very cunning. I picked up a tub of Sainsburys own brand guacamole and looked at the label.

But it could have been a cunning plan.

Tomatoes, coriander, lemon, chilli, sour cream, a little bit of avocado, etc. No great surprises. I set off to raid the store for ingredients.

First hitch, coriander. They had plenty of coriander. However, it looked really sad. And I mean *really* sad. This isn't "Kicked puppy" sadness so much as "I've just read the entirety of war and peace in one sitting and have now lost all will to live" sadness. It was that sad. So, substitution time. I picked up a pack of flat leaf parsley instead.

Next substitution: They were out of sour cream. This time War and Peace was inflicted upon me. Visions of guacamole receded into the distance, laughing as they ran.

Oh well. Creme fraiche is almost like sour cream, right?

A quick detour via the checkout and time to run gleefully home to attack my new purchases with spinning blades (of doom).

What I used:

3 largeish and very ripe avocados
4 smallish and rather pathetic looking not very ripe tomatoes
1/2 a medium sized red onion.
1 lime
1 lemon
3 small cloves of garlic
A medium sized bunch of flat leaf parsley.
half a tsp of powdered chilli
2 tsp salt
2 tsp brown sugar
250ml Creme Fraiche.

What I did:

It's not really rocket science. :-) The short answer is "Blended everything until it was thoroughly gooped". You can skip the rest of this section now.

• Squeezed the lemon and lime (using my cool and shiny juicer attachment on the food processor).


• Switched over to the spinning blades of doom and added the onion, garlic, salt, sugar and chilli. Span until ingredients were thoroughly doomed.


• Added the tomatoes and doomed them too, then the avocado, then the parsley. (I didn't want the parsley too fine, which is why I added it after there was a healthy quantity of goop to act as buffer).


• Finally added the creme fraiche and ran the food processor until it was all mixed.

Conclusion:

Here's a quote from immediately after making this:

<   David > That is a) An awful lot of guacamole and b) An awful lot of really damn good guacamole. :)

I don't really have much further to add to that, except that maybe it would be worth cooking the onion first next time - the recipe doesn't taste too oniony, but it has quite a strong aftertaste of it. Some cumin might not go amiss either.