First Attempt at Latkes

I made latkes about 2 months ago, from a recipe in a calendar.  Surprisingly, although I wrecked the kitchen, they came out, and in one piece.  Not bad for my first time.  Wringing the potato shreds dry after I food-processed them was the time-consuming part.  I still had to add some panko and other bread crumbs but once I fried them, they came out great.   

Autumn

Fall is here. Today the temperature only reached around 100 degrees in Mesa. It was muzzy outside, and my allergies were fierce. I baked pumpkin spice cookies from a packaged mix. Sometimes I spite myself and do something dumb, like stack all the baked cookies on top of one another even though they are still hot, and then they glump together. However, that simply gives me an excuse to eat the casualties. So I did that, as well as imbibe two different pumpkin beers. The first one, from Blue Moon, had a bit of spicy scent, but no actual pumpkin taste. The other one, Lakefront Pumpkin Lager, was a bit spicier and "pumpkiny-er". Also had some Trader Joe's sweet potato gnocchi. Delicious.

Indian Foods

I'm still looking for the direction I will go in with this blog.  Very excited about ethnic cuisines, particularly Indian.  Am reading, among other titles, Gil Marks' Encyclopedia of Jewish Foods.  There are Jewish food communities in India, of which I was unaware.  Marks' book has an amazing amount of info on the topic.  A couple of weeks ago, I visited an Indian market (and restaurant) and purchased some besan and some ajowan.  I was originally going to use the besan for making falafel, but instead, I'm going to try it as a thickener in some curry. 

Oxymel

So oxymel is a mixture of honey, vinegar (apple cider seems to be the flavor of choice) and garlic or other spices.  You're supposed to take it when you feel a cold coming on.  Sounds good to me--hot and sour soup seems to clear up my head colds almost immediately, and it has vinegar in it.  But oxymel would also help to soothe the throat. 

Don't mix artificial sugar with espresso.  It tastes like poisoned cherry cough syrup.  Just know this from my experience.

Potpourri

I remember that pizza was not my favorite food as a kid.  It grew on me, though, and now I have to admit it's in my top three food groups, the other two of which are curry and anything cooked over an open flame.
    In Girl Scouts we stopped one time for pizza on the way back from one of our badge-earning excursions.  From time to time on a Saturday night my family would go out for pizza.  Going to restaurants to eat was an occasion of great excitement, since we couldn't afford it often.  To this day, when I am in a restaurant I feel a bit numb and like it's unreal.  As a teenager, I was on a restricted-sodium diet, which didn't even offer me the luxury of ramen noodles right from the package.  Instead I had to use packets of low-sodium bouillon.  The chicken-flavored was chartreuse, probably my favorite color, just not in soup.  Even now, I'm extra-conscious of sodium.  Sadly, pizzas (even the frozen, amazing current supermarket offerings) are often so loaded with salt that I can't stop drinking water for the rest of the evening.  But what is more sacred than that first bite of tongue-scorching pizza, with the oil sinking into little pepperoni grooves atop the melted cheese?

Plans

Food projects I have for the next two weeks are: make a batch of latkes, a batch of spaetzle with a potato ricer, some low-calorie green goddess dressing, and try making fufu (a West African starch) from a packaged mix.  I have a West African cookbook with a recipe in it for groundnut (they call it groundnut, we call it peanut) chicken, which I will serve with the fufu.  Should be interesting. 

Brief Intro

     Hummus, pesto, roasting chiles and garlic, pizza, tuna tartare, beef carpaccio, espresso, meade, hot-and-sour soup from The House of Egg Roll, peanut sauce, country gravy, low-sodium V-8, green jalapeno hot sauce, dijon mustard: there's a reason I'm on this earth.  Cilantro?  Not so much.  Rosemary?  Tastes like mildew.   But I digress.  What I am here to yap about, whenever the mood hits, is anything to do with food, especially particular ingredients.  Favorite topics include herbs (love the language in old herbals), digestion, nutrition (especially evolutionary), foodborne illness, specific feasts in history, forbidden foods (In The Devil's Garden by Stewart Lee Allen is an excellent introduction) and ethnic foods.