True Confessions time:  I'm one of them.

You know the type:  Those insufferable louts who practice meditation in the form of navel orange gazing, selecting the Three Perfect Oranges from the supermarket bin for some recipe or other.  We babble about baklava and say "aubergine" instead of "eggplant" or "that funny black vegetable over there."  We haunt the food sites on the Internet and scarf up obscure recipes, then inflict our cooking experiences on others.  Our fridges and pantries contain the weirdest of weird ingredients.  Pomegranate molasses?  Got it.  Senna powder?  Thai basil? Guilty as charged.  We can pick up an unlabelled jar of some ground-up green spice, give it one sniff, and say "oregano" without even blinking.

'Fess up:  Who else has this addiction?

Well....

I'm not that extreme, but I do enjoy eating it daily.

So a foodie is someone who buys...food?

I guess I'm a foodie too lol.

I enjoy cooking, but I rarely do anything terribly fancy or complicated. Within my limits I'm a good cook; my lasagna seems to be everyone's favorite.

This is me, too. Or it would be if I could afford to stock the pantry. I love the craziest food and I want to cook it all, too.

I'm a decent enough cook and enjoy it, but I'm not especially sophisticated in the kitchen. I make a damn good spaghetti sauce, if I may say so. I think the best two dishes I ever cooked but could not reproduce since I was winging it rather than following a recipe were (1) pheasant with a plum sauce gravy and (2) a cream seafood stew.

In her mind, my wife is a foodie despite spending relatively little time in the kitchen, though she is actually a good cook. She spends hours watching cooking programs, is ultra choosy (read: big pain in the ass) when we shop for groceries together, and has strong, largely unsolicited opinions about every restaurant we've eaten at and how they compare with the restaurants she haunted in earlier years spent in New York, Chicago, and L.A.

Spoiler alert: Turns out Baton Rouge doesn't have restaurants that match up. Big fucking surprise.

---

Does anyone have experience with the Durian? I stare at them, fascinated, every time I go to the Asian market but wouldn't know what to do with one if I brought it home. I'm also a bit nervous about trying it, given all I've heard about the odor. I'm trying to wrap my head around how something can be said to have such an unpleasant odor but still be considered the 'king of fruit'?

Is its flavor comparable to anything else, or is it one of those 'you just have to try it to understand' things?

No kidding, back when smoothies were the new big thing I tried to come up with a mushroom smoothie.


Yeah, it's been years and years now, and the horror of all that a mushroom smoothie is still haunts my waking life and renders my dreams into the cold gray grainy spew of ghastliness.



Anyhow, I still like trying things in the kitchen, but I keep a realistic awareness of the COST OF FAILURE.

Senna powder, really? Could just cook with chocolate Ex Lax I suppose.

Grew up with Beverly Hillbillies diet. Not to many critters from the plains I haven't tried. 

As for my spice palate, I have about a dozen that I use, all considered normal. 

Well, I have over 50 different spices in my pantry. I like to experent and tweak existing recipes and further that by developing my own combination of flavors.

I had Savannah make a ginger rous last weekend for stir fry and it turned out perfect.

(December 2, 2016 at 6:52 pm)Nymphadora Wrote: Well, I have over 50 different spices in my pantry. I like to experent and tweak existing recipes and further that by developing my own combination of flavors.

I had Savannah make a ginger rous last weekend for stir fry and it turned out perfect.

How many of those pasty frecklers did it take?