food thoughts

[toastykitten]

• We still do not cook enough, but we're getting much better about it. We have made some discoveries in our food obsession:
• Anthony Bourdain, for all his "charm" (I'm not sure how else to put it), is a terrible cookbook writer. We've made a few things from his Les Halles cookbook, and they were totally a lot of work with not a very big payoff in flavor. For example, we made a fish and potatoes recipe. In the book, it tells you to boil the potatoes before you stick them in the oven with the fish. What the recipe does not tell you, but the picture does, is that the potatoes need to be cut up.
• Ming Tsai recipes are pretty good. Plus the man is so pretty.
• Gourmet recipes are really good, if kind of a pain to do.
  
• Farmer's market vegetables are soooo much better than what you get at Safeway. Especially tomatoes.
• My sister revealed that we used to have a kiwi tree. And a raspberry plant. That got chopped down. Also on the chopping block: our apple tree, pomegranate tree, lemon tree, wine grapes. What took its place: my mom's giant zucchinis and tomatoes and green beans and other things. I think our lemon tree is growing back.
• Organic Safeway garbanzo beans SUCKS ASS. I think we bought one can because we decided to experiment a little. We decided to make hummus with it and it had NO flavor. Then we cranked up the garlic and that made it palatable. I even fed it to my sister and my cousin.
• By the way, what the fuck is up with "organic" cereal like Rice Crispies? Isn't that still processed stuff with the same amount of bad stuff in it?
• We shop at a ton of different markets. Not because we want to, but because the stuff we need cannot be found in just one supermarket. There's no American market that has fresh fish swimming around in an aquarium-like thing where we can buy fresh fish that can be gutted and fried for us, or decent pita bread and pickled things and cheap falafel, or seaweed or good rice crackers and other necessary Asian snacks for a good price.