Category: american diet

January 1

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Starting off the new year with that classic resolution stuff, the inclination to make myself a better person and a happier girl.  I want to feel good about myself, I don’t want to get caught up in my own hang ups about wanting to be more, wanting to be different, making goals and not reaching them.  I don’t want to keep thinking about self improvement, I want it to actually happen.  I don’t want to hide from what scares me through a mask of food or alcohol abuse.  I don’t want to do things out of boredom.  I want to find inspiration in the ordinary, I want to find happiness on my own terms.

Like always, to ring in the new year, for the first month I am treating myself properly by following the right diet.  You are what you eat, I preach it all the time, and it is time to follow my own advice.  Eating properly is the first and most important step for self respect.  This means eating nutritionally dense food that has minimal processing.  Respecting the vegetable, avoiding the sugar.

It is not a diet, it is pressing the reset button, rebooting my appetite, focusing on putting my health before fun, reestablishing a system of rewards that is not based on cookies and bourbon, but based instead on inner happiness and finding peace with reality.

 

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TV Teacher

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Cooking shows do no in fact teach you how to cook.  So you are correct when you say you watch them but you still do not feel adept in the kitchen.  This is why they have morphed into reality show programs based on celebrity gossip, wild hair, eccentric personalities, and showpiece spectacles.  The shows cannot sustain as a cooking demonstrations because it is not working.

Learning is not fun, it is not passive, it cannot be done in your pj’s while eating cereal.  Learning takes time, concentration, note taking and information review, the active process of thinking.  TV does not make you think, that is the beauty behind it.

Cooking show are not working because things are not done real time.  The ingredients magically show up, ready to be tossed in the pot, the final product mysteriously has a twin that has already been cooked or assembled.  Gathering ingredients, sourcing, choosing the right one, measuring, chopping, peeling, all around handling, are the hardest parts in cooking.  Knowing when something is done or when to check it and  determining what heat to apply are the intuitive factors that come with calculation and experience.

The host is not actually handling the raw products which in turn makes them unidentifiable. This creates a distance between you and the knowledge of your food.   It makes you not know what to look for at the grocery store, it makes you not know how to eyeball amounts of things, you can’t register the texture or moisture content.

And of course, you cannot smell through the television, so I am not sure who thought this was a good idea.  Feeling, smelling, and intuition are large parts of knowing how to cook, instead of merely following a few recipes from Rachael Ray.

Food Writing Upgrade

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Not to focus the full fury of Marigold’s spite directly at one particular website, but the thesis of this particular argument is one that supports a more diverse amount of websites to deal with said issue.  There really is only one in which to point the digital finger, and that lucky contestant is Yelp.

Restaurants hate Yelp because it is the opinion of the ignorant masses.  The public also is over Yelp because it does not offer well balanced advice.   Yet consumers continue to use the website because they don’t know where else to go for a quick and informed decision on where to eat dinner, lunch, a quick snack, who offers breakfast.  There are so many restaurants in the big city, and so many contingents to evaluate.  Hungry people pour over stranger’s opinions and place their fate in what to order based on this amateur information.

The fact that Yelp is so popular and so mediocre goes to show that we need to have more food writers, more restaurant critics, and more websites that can digest this giant culinary scene for the hungry and rushed masses.  There needs to be more information offered up in the reviews, such as where is good for a group, where is good for a casual encounter, where is good for a quiet date, where is good for music, where is good to dine alone.  What places focus on healthy food, what places have small portions or large plates.  Where should you take your mom?  All of these fields of inquiry are important, but instead of having an informative amount of information provided, we get endless pictures of food and chef gossip.

We need more food professionals, more writers for digestion.

Pop Music According to Culinary Standards

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Scientists say that what makes Indian foods so delicious is that there are not a lot of overlapping taste profiles.  The combination of dishes represents a large blanket of flavors, each dish adding something into the large pot of taste.  This is somewhat contradictory to what you would expect out of a scientific study to explain what makes food so delicious.  Obviously flavors that pair well together make something delicious, therefore one would assume that the most delicious food have a lot of similarities.  But the opposite is the case, it take a team of players to create a delicious playing field.  It takes a lot of separate moving parts to create an elaborate plan.  This synergy of sensation is what makes for the best meal.

This same concept of complexity in food can help explain what makes contemporary music so terrible.  There are not enough different sounds happening to create an intriguing and complex piece. Classical music is amazing because it has a million components moving harmoniously at the same time, a synergy of sounds creates a rich experience.  Pop music has maybe four things going on.  And while this can lead to something deliciously melodic, it cannot hold up on the grandiose scale of the auscultatory world.

Good Morning America

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With global trade accessible at our fingertips, quick and nationally available shipping, and affordable and lightweight tools, there is just about nothing in the culinary world that we cannot produce in our own homes or in community of restaurants.   Now with Amazon now and Google Express you can probably get that any ingredient or tool delivered right into your hands in less than an hour.  Talk about modern convenience, remember when the only delivery was pizza?  Talk about being spoiled.  On top of this access to endless ingredients and a million handy tools to aid in the processing of said ingredients, there is a modern and easy to use instruction book also at your fingertips, the all-knowing oracle.  You can find any recipe and there is a good chance that there is a YouTube instructional video.

Out of like a zillion possibilities, how come Americans are so determined to eat the blandest food with the longest possible shelf life?  I am talking about mac and cheese, dried pasta and jar marinara sauce, white bread with bologna and mustard, canned spaghetti O’s, canned soup, frozen TV dinners, vacuumed sealed meats.  Not only is this diet monotone in taste and excitement, it is completely devoid of nutrition, life sustaining energy, not resembling anything that was ever alive, all the vitamins artificially forced back in.  Eating good makes you feel good, and feeling good is pretty much the goal for everyone’s life.

We are spoiled people living in a spoiled society.  We have been given the world and this is what we do with it: eat cold wraps from 7/11, buy previously frozen food that the grocery store has reheated for you, satisfy that deep and eternal hunger with a blank white starch while we mindlessly watch TV.

It is time that we wake up and smell the fresh fruit.  We are missing out on one of the biggest joys in this circus we call life with these poorly made dinner decisions.

Modern Fashion

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Dear Sir/Ma’am,

I must say, dress so well from head to tippy toe, you look very dashing in your designer style, with your brand new clothes, perfectly fitting attire.  From those sleek leather brown shoes to that subtly patterned grey tie that matches perfectly with a maroon button up shirt that is delicately textured and the dark gray and black suit with its tightly woven fabric, adorned with a perfectly fitting belt, manicured hands, trendy socks from the department store, always freshly trimmed haircut, dapper facial hair, musky cologne.

You are so put together, so apparently success, so outwardly powerful, clearly manager of both work and home, a statuesque icon of modern adulthood and sex appeal.

You take care of your life, health, money, I am sure even your yard so well.  I bet your shower curtain doesn’t even have mold growing on the inside hem.

I don’t understand with all this foresight, planning, and education that you eat that junk that passes as food for lunch.  How can you put that into your body as an adequate food supply for your brain power and muscle stamina?

You act like you treat yourself with so much respect, but you are eating food type substances that contains no nutritional value, has never even once been alive considering how much processing it has undergone, food where green is saved for food coloring, where everything is pre cooked, prepackaged, prearranged to fit everyone’s love for salt and stopping there.  How, Sir/Ma’am, how long can you put up with charade of eating?  Eat something that resembles something living.  Eat a lot of plants and vegetables.  Yes, that means you need to use a knife.  Sharp objects are fun to play with, that is a promise.

Dinner, easy and semi quick.

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Butter Chicken Comfort Dinner!

This is the way-about for making a delicious Indian comfort food in an electric pressure cooker.  This machine is amazing.  You plug it in, set a time, push a button, and walk away.  That is it. In an hour you have a delicious dinner that was so easy it leaves you guessing at why so many people eat out all the time.

A Marigold style recipe, which is basically a list of ingredients and steps.  How much of everything to add?  Use your intuition, your brain, and most importantly your tongue.  Don’t follow a list of items blinding, taste everything as you go along, and fit the recipe to your desire.

1.5 pounds of chicken thighs, marinated in 1 cup/ two large spoonful of tangy yogurt, a couple squirts of lemon juice, a dash of garam Masala, cumin, turmeric salt, and pepper. Like 2 teaspoons of each. Two cloves of grated garlic and a knob of ginger.

Mix together and marinate at room temperature or overnight.  How long you ask, up to a couple of days, or as quickly as two drinks can allow.  Cooking is about looking forward to the end product, so marinate yourself and get distracted by something inspirational while the chicken does its resting.

We are going to cook the chicken in an electric pressure cooker, which diminishes cooking time so dramatically, that you can take the time for your chicken thighs to tenderize.  You can always opt to braise on the stove, but you are going to added two hours to the process.  If you marinate ahead, or have the whole evening at your leisure, this is definitely an equally viable option.  But if you are like me, and it is already 8 by the time you get back from the store, modern pressure cooking is the way to go for the day.

Two drinks later, or an hour:  Put the chicken and the marinate into the magical machine.  Add a can of crushed tomatoes, a can of coconut milk or cream, 1-2 sweet potatoes, an onion, a large spoonful of nut butter (I prefer cashew, use what you will), and a stick of butter.  Set that timer button for 10 minutes and let the machine do its thing.

Finish with cilantro, and a slash of lime, enjoy thoroughly.

Whimiscal Beer, I Am In

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If hops are of the cannabis family, then we have to assume that beer used to be brewed with THC on a consistent basis for thousands of years.  That is not a shocking assumption to be made.  Like hops, pot is easy to grow, its kinda like a weed.

Contemporarily, home brewers experiment with this idea, but this is too small.  Dry hopping THC into beer does not need to be relegated to your closet fermentation.  It needs to storm the market, be a thing.  A trend packaged and all dolled up, pushed about the young and adventurous, to be popular and the largest party hit.  The people will love it.

Colorado, where are you on this project?  You better hurray up and dominate the market, else America’s high five is going to steal it from you.

Hop Ya Later

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Americans do not have the best taste, but they certainly have the best influence on worldly culture.

I am not sure how the west coast hop craze has overtaken the palate of the so called sophisticated beer aficionados, but the why does not matter.  What matters here is how this dominant influence of dry and dominating, one dimensional flavor has quickly and subtly changed the beers that I know and love.  Sounds like a terrible date, why would you want to put that description on your tongue.  You would never even give that guy a first chance.  <shivers>

They have gotten more hoppy.  All of them.  Craft beers, old standbys, well-know favorites, new creations. All of them.  All beer has changed in style like the latest fashion trend.  All of the good, well rounded, malty with a touch of hoppy, benevolent ESBs from the English country side, the hefty bastard from Scotland, has drifted towards the side of the west coast.  It’s not that my tongue has been burned by consumption of hops over the years, that is not how it works.  My tongue is not burned, honestly beer has become more bitter. It is leaning away from the malty goodness, out of partiality, and into the kingdom of the west.

Give me the balance.  Give me the complex.  Give me something that continues to grow as you sip beer after beer.  Like a lays potato chip, nobody has just one.  Let the flavors linger and get to know one another, let’s explore a whole palate of what the beerscape has to offer.

You have watered down the beer taste you assholes.  Stop ruining my life, you American hipsters.

Why Eating in America Sucks #5

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Recycling is a concept.  It does not actually exist. Yes there are those blue bins dotting down the alleys, but is the trash even sorted in this great large city?  I have my doubts.  Remember when you were supposed to put your recycling in a blue bag, tie it up, and throw it in with the rest of your trash?  Yeah, that happened.  That was the city’s solution to the recycling problem for years.  Yeah right like somebody actually sorted the trash and picked out those gross blue bags.  This is why I have my doubts that the new recycling program with those fancy blue bins are actually getting the job done.

Unfortunately the full and disturbing extent of the issue does not stop here.  With the alleys full of blue dots, at least we are pretending to care.  Not in food service.  Here, we don’t even pretend to try to recycle.  There is only one bin, and let me tell you it is black.

Not even cardboard boxes are recycled.  It is truly sick.

Even the places that say they do, it’s about a 50/50 shot.   Don’t be fooled, recycling is not happening.

Yes, this is part where you are supposed to get angry.