On Life As A Picky Foodie

I had a post written and ready to put up.  Completed, done, signed, sealed, deli--- then I had a conversation with a woman about life insurance.  Because when you’re an adult, you need to talk about things like that.  Eesh.

So we talked about death, this woman and I, and how much DW would get, how much I would get in the event of.  Somehow every amount of money sounds ridiculous.  “We’re sorry for your loss, but here’s the cash we agreed to pay you.”

Now I know, rationally, as an adult, that this is a necessary step to take, but the rest of me was screaming about how wrong all of this was.

Still, I sat through the thirty-eight minutes of questions – do you have a terrible illness?  Have you had a terrible illness?  Have your parents had a terrible illness?  Do you envisage getting a terrible illness?  Is there any reason to suspect you will have a terrible illness at some point? 

Some questions made me laugh: do you regularly go potholing or bungee jumping? 

Other questions were downright terrifying: about alcoholism and drug abuse, about family histories and previous health problems.  I wondered how people who do suffer such afflictions feel having to divulge God knows what to the stranger reading the questionnaire on auto-pilot.

What does this have to do with food, health and general Picky Foodie themes, you ask? 

Well after this young lady had finished making sure my kidneys, liver, lungs and heart have no history of crapping out on me, after she had made sure that I don’t have any STDs, that I’m not HIV positive and that I don’t suffer from psychosis, neurosis or other psychiatric problems, she said “I’m very sorry but I’m going to have to ask you a sensitive question…” she hesitated.  Then she got the courage to continue: “What is your dress size?”

Uh, what? 

I couldn’t resist: “THAT is your sensitive question?”

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on just how ridiculous that conversation was.  But in honour of my waistline and yours, I would like to share a lovely New Potato salad recipe.  It keeps well, travels well and fills you up regardless of your dress size.

Let me say this: I’m not a fan of the popular potato (I know, I don’t drink nor do I like potatoes.  And yet, I live in England.).  Last week, at the farmer’s market, however, DW mentioned how much he would enjoy some from time to time.  As fate would have it, a great looking spud salad was featured on one of my favourite mainstream recipe sites – Food52.  This is the second time I make this dish in as many weeks, and the second time it disappears remarkably quickly.    

New Potato Salad
(adapted from Food52)

The key to this recipe is to make it while the potatoes are still warm so they can soak up the lovely vinaigrette.  Prep time is around a half hour from start to finish.  It keeps well in the refrigerator for a few days and is hearty enough for grey summer days yet refreshing enough for sunny picnics. 

-  1 kg new potatoes, scrubbed and cut into large bite-sized pieces
-  1 T ume plum vinegar
-  100 gr rocket (arugula)
-  2 T fresh chives, finely chopped
-  2 spring onions, finely chopped
-  1 T mustard
-  1 T balsamic vinegar
-  1 T pomegranate vinegar (optional–replace with an additional T of balsamic)
-  2 T olive oil
-  ½ t salt or to taste

Bring the potatoes to a boil in a pot of water.  Cook for about 10 minutes, until soft but not mushy.  Drain and put in a large salad bowl.

Add the ume vinegar and salt to the potatoes and mix gently so the potatoes pieces stay more of less whole.  Then gently mix in the chives and spring onions.

For the vinaigrette:  whisk together the mustard, vinegar and olive oil.  Pour over the potatoes and mix in well. 

At this point, the mixture should still be relatively warm.  Now is the time to add the rocket (arugula). 

Serve warm or at room temperature. 

One question many people ask me is about disasters in the kitchen.  Have I had any?  What were they?  Truth be told, I don’t often remember as that’s not what I tend to dwell on.  However, one meal – if you can call it that -- does stick in my mind and since January is Detox month, I thought I’d come clean and write about it.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to eating healthy food, people really want to be wooed.  If I said I was deep frying my kitchen sink, expectations would probably not be as high, but being known as a “healthy” person, means dinner guests expect to be impressed.

It’s as if healthy automatically means sawdust in most people’s minds.  And if you’re not planning on serving steamed sawdust, then you’d better come up with something spectacular.  Personally, I find that quite strange, but whatever…

On the other side of that is the person doing the cooking – me in this case. I don’t really fret over it anymore: like with most things, the more experience I have with cooking, the easier it feels.  However, it wasn’t always thus.

A few years back, my grandmother came to visit.  I was just beginning my Picky Foodie journey and wasn’t as comfortable in the kitchen as I am now.  My beloved grandmother was let’s say a tad sceptical about this whole “healthy” business.  I, however, was determined to change her mind – almost defensively so. 

All had gone relatively well until then, mostly because I had eased her into my cooking and supplemented liberally with bread, butter, cheese and brownies from The Kitchen Table, a favourite café up the road where everything is made from scratch using fresh and high quality ingredients.  My grandmother had politely declined most of my homemade offerings, or, at the most, tasted a bit or two, and nodded politely. 

I remained nevertheless determined to seduce her palate.  The plan was to make a broccoli soup.  It was going to be vegan and cold though not quite raw as I was planning to steam the broccoli.  Don’t ask me why, I thought it was a good idea to make something I had never made before – it was a recipe I was going to tackle for the first time!

You see, I wanted to woo my grandmother not only with the amazing flavours, but also with my incredible talent in the kitchen. 

Yeah, that didn’t exactly go as planned. 

I made two fatal mistakes:

The first was thinking a vegetable is a vegetable is a vegetable.  Once upon a time in an era when my cooking had consisted of heaping steaming food out of takeaway packages, my friend H had shared a foolproof recipe for vegan cauliflower soup.  No, not broccoli, cauliflower…  That day, I thought, how different can they really be?   

My second mistake was a little subtler.  My friend’s recipe called for a ton of soy milk.  Having recently been diagnosed with a thyroid problem, that wasn’t going to work for me.  Luckily, I had also become more interested in the raw food movement.  No problem in that case: I figured I’d simply use cashews instead of soy milk.  Cashews are used extensively in raw food.  They are used to make cheeses, blended and strained as mylk, and thrown in virtually everything as thickeners.  Cashews are like a magic raw ingredient (though hard-core raw foodists don’t often eat as much fat as that, in addition to the fact that many packaged cashews are heated above what is acceptable… but bla la bla -- I digress) and I thought they would be a perfect replacement for the soya milk.  Wrong Again!

The result was knobbly, lumpy, tasteless and FUGLY.  Fugly, fugly, fugly.  Green polka dot fugly.  My grandmother took one bite and shyly and politely asked may I have another piece of bread please?

Here’s the kicker, though.  My goal was to wow my guests – and one in particular – but I didn’t actually taste what I was going to be serving them beforehand.  Now maybe if I had made the recipe, oh I don’t know, a hundred times already, I might have gotten away with it.  But this was my first shot.  And man did it bomb. 

Luckily, my grandmother has never refused to try anything I have made.  She has an itty bitty bite of everything.  Since the broccoli soup disaster, she has gone on to pronounce my cooking Interesting and even asks for seconds sometimes.  Though she’s made it very clear that she still prefers her toast and jam. 

These Gluten Free Flatbreads, on the other hand, my grandmother has always enjoyed.

Gluten-Free Spring Onion Flatbreads
(makes 6 large flatbreads – great with spreads)

1 C brown rice flour
½ C chickpea flour
½ t arrowroot powder
½ t baking soda
½ t xantham gum
¼ t salt (or to taste)
1 T olive oil
½ t balsamic vinegar
4 spring onions, finely chopped
1 ½ C water

Preheat the oven to 120 degrees Centigrade (248 Fahrenheit).

Combine the dry ingredients.  Add the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add the spring onion. 

Mixing as you go, add the water gradually until the batter is almost watery, but still thick. 

Heat a non-stick pan until water spatters on the surface.  Keeping the heat on medium, ladle ½ cup of the batter at a time into the pan.  You know it’s time to flip the flatbread once the edges start getting hard. 

Once each side is starting to brown, put in the oven.  Bake for about ½ hour.