February 16, 2011
I identify myself as a “foodie”.
There, I said it.
I identify with a word that brings about utter loathing in more than a few people lately, and the loudest seems to be a certain book review from the Atlantic this month.
I am a foodie because I enjoy cooking. I enjoy trying new things, whether it be taking on the challenge of tempering chocolate, mastering a gluten free pizza crust, or simply trying new flavors that I haven’t combined together before. I enjoy going out to nice restaurants, and drinking wine that is meant to be more than a mere vehicle to transform shy people into extroverts over the course of an evening. Currently we don’t have children, we don’t have pets, we don’t go see movies or concerts and the decor of our 50m2 of sacred space is drearily austere and minimalistic. So I don’t mind spending money on quality food, either when eating out exploring a new place, or purchasing ingredients at the market to use when I cook at home.
So why all the negativity with the word? Because some people think being a foodie is by definition a state of elitism, resulting in an innate need to push said food-related pretension onto the masses with the zeal of religious fervor. But really, how is being a food snob any different than being a snob about anything else? Isn’t showing off ostentatiously to allow yourself to feel better at the cost of the egos of everyone around you the very meaning of snobbery, which has existed in some form, not exclusive to matters of the stomach, for oh I don’t know, several millennia?
Are there people who take the enjoyment of food to religious levels, so much so that their opinions and beliefs around which their worldview of food centers start sounding like a fanatical evangelistic sermon? One whose goal is to either convert the rest of us to their beliefs, or at least to try to make us feel very guilty for not “drinking the kool-aid”? Sure there are.
February 14, 2011
Sometimes I love Daring Cooks’ challenges, and sometimes I’m just “meh” about them. This month, however, I knew right away that it was going to be a lot of fun. We often make soba noodles in our house since we learned where to find 100% buckwheat noodles, and both of us love tempura (deep fried anything is usually a winner with most people).
I originally had a lot of commentary to say (I always have lots of commentary), but today I am going to keep things short. I had a crazy busy trip to Zürich last week, and did a lot of deep thinking that I still have to process in my head a bit. So instead, I will leave you with some photos of beautiful Zürich and the lake – Zürich really has nothing to do with the dish of this Daring Cooks’ post, other than the fact that I did have sushi one night while I was there, and well, that’s Japanese too, haha…. yeah a bit of a stretch eh? Well sometimes we are stretched a bit thin – a bit like these soba noodles (ok, that was a terrible connection I know!) – so you’ll have to bear with me for the moment and just admire some pretty photos, and I’ll leave my comments on the recipe version I made below as well….
Each piece contributed to the final dish, and the dessert would have been lacking if it were missing any of the components. But one can’t make the whole dish at once. Like any recipe, it’s a series of steps. Small increments forward, and when finished you can look back and see how far the food has come, transformed from the simplest of places. Really, cooking any recipe embraces this philosophy – it’s something I love about being in the kitchen. Cooking is therapeutic in its own right.
