While I can’t exactly say that I’ve learned to cook anything new and amazing yet, I can say I have lots of new ideas for dishes I want to look up. Here are some kitchen ideas I want to bring home:
- fennel – It is great in salads
- sprouts – We sprouted some beans at home after our trip to Costa Rica in 2006, and I’m inspired to get back to it again because they give such substance to salads, especially with salted sunflower seeds
- baking bread – I probably won’t get around to this for a long time, but our second Italian wwoof hostess regularly made some whole wheat bread with her own leaver (Is that the word?) and it was tasty and amazingly filling. The rest of the world seems to eat a lot more bread than the US, and it is much better and also much cheaper (often subsidized with fixed prices…)
- eggplant – I don’t think it’s possible to cook it wrong. We ate a lot of stewed eggplant, tomato, garlic, oil dish in Morocco and it’s stupendous. I think I could eat it everyday.
- veggies in sandwiches – I think at home this is underappreciated. Sure Subway will put a few raw veggies in but it’s nothing creative. Today at lunch we had sandwiches and Jack’s had a coleslaw, an eggplant dish like what I just described, a chickpea and tomato dish and regular lettuce, tomato and meat. More is better!
- pressure cooker – As scary as they may be, I think I need to get over it and get one. All of our wwoof hosts have made wonderful concoctions with them and I suspect that few people cook beans regularly without them.
- cream – Ah France and it’s vast consumption of dairy products, which was a bit much, in my opinion. That said, adding a little cream to a quick zucchini soup goes quite a long way.
Oh and by the way family, I have even eaten a few olives! I don't love them, but some of the "less-olivey" (according to Jack, this means less briney) olives are not terrible.
I would heavily second your comments on fennel, eggplant, and pressure cookers.
ReplyDeleteI got a pressure cooker in Brazil and while its great for cooking beans fast, it's not that often that I cook beans. instead, it will often turn a difficult to cook cut of meat into a tender, moist dish.
Eggplant is so meaty, it's great. I use it to make lasagna, substituting it for the noodles. The smaller the eggplant, the better it tastes I've found.
And fennel is really, really great...in the US it tends to be expensive, it makes me wonder how hard it would be to grow in the PNW.
Have you heard of 'baking artisan bread in 5 minutes a day'? it's a book but google it...it's really possible, 5 minutes.