I love the internet for food adventuring. Most of the time, I like fast healthy food that I can make up fairly quickly, but I like to also try new things, a spice, a recipe, add a taste or a flavor to my menu, and I try to experience at least one new thing every week or so.
But every once in awhile, I like to go on an all out Food Adventure!
With the internet, you can go to YouTube and learn how to use a spice, make a dish, cook something you have never even heard of before.
In January, I decided I was going to learn to cook a Malaysian dish that I had read about on the internet. I researched various recipes and finally chose one that sent me on a quest through five different stores (some with things in them no grown woman should ever have to set eyes upon) to acquire all the many ingredients it called for. I spent hours on YouTube learning how to peel this or pound that. On the great day of the event that I cooked this, I spent five hours as a mad scientist cook. I lost one pan, sent my husband out for the ingredient I needed to replace (after I lost a pan burning it). I chopped, blended, pounded, prepped a bazillion strange things that got blended together in sequences and simmered and stewed.
In the end, I served a dinner that my husband loved and relished but that I could not eat when I learned I was allergic to coconut. (Yes, also the same ingredient I lost a pan trying to roast the first time.) But what a great adventure it was! I was introduced to so many unusual and exotic spices and I bonded that day forever with my food processor that I had only previously known on passing occasions. And, yes, I will never cook that dish again, but I had the Most Fun going on that adventure once!
Every once in awhile, holding an exotic spice to one's nose or hammering a flavor out of what had previously seemed inedible can be an amazing experience.
What are your food adventures?
-bbffair
[Illustration above: Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy-Adventure Stories (December 1936, vol. 5, no. 3) featuring "Viper Pit" by Alan Anderson. Courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org]
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