According to the study, Western cuisines have a tendency to pair ingredients that share many of the same flavor compounds. East Asian cuisines, however, do precisely the contrary, avoiding ingredients that share the same flavor compounds. The more flavors two ingredients share, the less likely they would be paired together in Asian kitchens.
Make an apple bourbon bundt cake for Thanksgiving instead of pumpkin pie. Sounds delish!
A bundt cake, which is really just like an oversize muffin baked in a fancy pan, is easy to whip up. The booze bath helps keep it fresh.
And here’s the recipe.
So I realized earlier this week that when I posted about the guest post that I didn’t write, that I didn’t explain why I was posting about a guest post that I didn’t write. So allow me to rectify that now:
See, we have this friend named A, and she’s a pretty super-cool person who has a blog and writes about food and life and writing and kids and stuff like that, and every year for the past two years she has had Soup Week, which is basically where she makes a lot of soup. As near as I can tell, she doesn’t actually make all of the soup in the same week.
So anyways, this year she decided to have some guest bloggers write about soup as well, which is why I didn’t write a guest blog post for her. And in case you missed all of that from the first time around, you should go check out all eleven of her awesome soups here (and as an added bonus, you can see last year’s, too).
However, I do have a point to this post besides plugging for A’s blog. And that is hot and sour soup, which we made, and which looks like this:
This particular soup was more hot than sour, which suited me just fine, but I think threw K’s tastebuds into a bit of a cow-wrangling session.
(Look, don’t ask me where that metaphor came from, because I don’t know)
You can find the recipe here, and you should go make it! Because it was yummy! As an aside, we used chicken broth instead of vegetable broth, chicken instead of tofu, and two hot red small chilis and a bunch of chili powder instead of the chili sauce.
Ok, that’s a lie. Here’s what really happened:
K wrote a guest post for A’s blog about a soup that I made and already wrote a non-guest post about because I’m too busy writing a NaNo story about P, J, and E (among others). Whew!
This is an interesting article discussing taste aversion — that is, what happens to your brain when you get sick from eating food. It’s interesting that our brains are good (relatively speaking) at figure out that we’ve been poisoned, but really bad at figuring out what poisoned us.
I have a minor taste aversion to strawberry shortcake with whipped cream on top, because I ate it a few years ago and promptly got ridiculously sick. Even though I know there’s nothing wrong with it (and will still eat it on occasion), it makes me a little queasy thinking about it. What about you? Any strange taste aversions?
Being something of a photography snob and a food snob, I had to laugh about this pinup chicken photo, and the accompanying do-it-yourself post on the NYTimes. Apparently the secret is a “bustier specimen with loose skin”.
If you’re in New York, you should look this guy up. He sounds pretty amazing.
He can make a card levitate or materialize on the bottom of a customer’s shoe. He often asks a customer to grab his or her wallet and pull out a random piece of currency. Then, within seconds, Mr. Beckerman will flip through a deck of cards and extract four whose numbers precisely match the last four digits of the bill’s serial number, in order.
K really wants to get a kitchen scale. I never bother to measure anything* when I cook anyways, so it’s arguably less useful for me.
* Yea, you know those recipes I post with nice, precise measurements? Most of them are made up. Just so you know.
I think ketchup is nasty. I don’t really understand why people like it, and it makes me feel kindof dirty to think that ketchup is America’s best-known contribution to the world culinary scene (or so this article claims). However, I do like chutneys of almost any variety, so I could see recasting ketchup as an “American chutney”.
Well, maybe not 50, but here’s a bunch. We’ve been getting quite a bit of aubergine (the fancy name for eggplant) through our CSA. I have been gradually acquiring a taste for it, though the texture still weirds me out a lot.