The History of Taste

What you see above is an example of a great book: mixing history and food together into a great history of taste as why we eat what we eat. Not so much for the physiology of how we as humans developed a taste for something in particular, but more so how and why people cooked and ate the food they did. I finished this book, just this week with a last chapter focusing on everything from the 19th century until now.

The first chapter or so explains how humans at some point began to have the need for fats in their body, which then help the brain and nerves evolve and grow. It was suggested that the earliest form of fats, was sugar in the form of nectar or wild honey. That started it all as while humans started to evolve they needed more and more nutrients and it was discovered that cooking food made it easier to digest. I know that in the past 20-30 years, there have been a large number of experts who suggest that raw food is better for your body or that no meats or fat are better as well and while I can live with their opinions, history has showed us that humans are meant to eat meats and fats.

Around the middle of the book, it starts to look at food and eating by different cultures. For instance; the ancient Greeks believed that eating meat was obscene and was evil, so they ate mostly lentils and vegetables. The Romans and other cultures had no problem with meat and ate large amounts of it as well as other foods. In ancient China, kitchens were made with a "demon" painted on the wall or decorated somewhere in it. The demon was to represent a spirit who was cursed by eating too much food so when food is eaten and prepared in an ancient Chinese kitchen, the people must take only what they can and will eat and no more, as to not waste it as well.

With information and recipes dating back a thousand years or more, for added insight, the book explains and answers some great questions, like who invented ice cream? The Arabs invented ice cream almost a thousand years or more back. They developed a way to cool water using salt and then to freeze cream and sugar, producing the first ice creams, or to be technical, it was gellato.

It is larger than an average sized book and with about 370 pages in it, it makes for a long read, if you are busy or a good afternoon read if you have the time. Highly recommended:

 Food: The History of Taste (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Bon Appetit magazine

Most of the time when I get the bon appetit magazine, it is fun to look through and that is about it. Filled with recipes involving black truffles and swordfish and articles detailing the photographer's trip to the Tuscan countryside, little is listed about what can be done with normal items. This recipe, we came across, in this month's issue is labeled as Moroccan Carrot Soup.

This soup, uses all simple ingredients, like chicken stock, carrots, fresh nutmeg, and a few others, but nothing expensive or even remotely costly. This recipe was quite easy as you place all ingredients in a pot, cook until tender and then place in a blender. The picture shows a before and here is what it looked like after it was blended and heated back up.
The soup overall was delicious as this recipe was right on track. So, I will look harder in the magazine and it is nice that they are throwing in recipes that do not involve $100 worth of ingredients as I think I spent $10 for
all of this.

What have I been doing...

The work of a father and husband is never finished but as if that wasn't enough, I do the cooking for home and to bring some food for our work. Unlike other chefs or others in the natural/organic food or holistic business, I do not own a money tree. My family and I cannot afford to do our normal daily shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joes and because of this, I feel that some people do not take my plus holistic, seriously. As for cooking, I try to do it old school style. My idea of cooking is what your grandmother did, you know, make fresh bread on Sunday and then on Friday right before it turned, make bread pudding or stuffing out of it. That is what I do. I also make desserts and other tasty things from scratch, like brownies. If you need a box of pre-made mix, to make brownies, then you need to just quit right there.

While I would love to do a 'Julie and Julia' type of thing with one of my cookbooks, doing more than one recipe for a month, like all Batali, some of the recipes use ingredients that I just don't have at my ready. On top of that, I come home from work at 6:30 so I don't have the most amount of time to do much of anything. I get away with cooking some dishes, the night before, then using the extra time, to cook some more. I don't cook on the weekends, as this is when my wife wants to get out of the house and enjoy the weather. So, while it may only take me an hour to make something, some weeks I don't even have that on the weekend.

If I had the time and the money, I'd love to work on my cooking mastery. While still having no real formal training in cooking, I know that there are 5 ways of cooking everything: boiling, bake, steam, saute' and grilling. Everything that is out there comes from one of these. Broiling, is just revers grilling and sous vide is just boiling in a bag.

If I had what I wanted, I would do true iron chef style, where I would first buy a protein, like 5 pounds of chicken breasts and then take one pound each and do a different cooking method. Chicken, chicken, let's see.... well, you could rub the chicken with panko bread crumbs and some salt and pepper and bake it in the oven, place it with some vegetables like asparagus and put it in one of those steamer bags with some rice and let it steam, chop it up and stir fry it with some broccoli and carrots, boil it with some potatoes and noodles in a large pot of water and make chicken soup or you could just slap a chicken breast on the grill and baste it with BBQ sauce.

5 methods, right there, but can I do it? Saying that I have mastered something would be truly awesome and cheap, in the sense of doing it with fruits and vegetables. But where should I start? Apples. I will start with apples and this week, I will work on apples and see what can be done with apples. I know that julie did a new recipe each day, but I am already almost 4 months in, so I need to get going.

If I do a mastery a night, and I am 90 days out, then I need to do 18 different veggies. Now what makes this unfair for this challenge, is that I do canning. Last night, I even experimented with a fruit that I only first tasted over Christmas in Beirut: cherimoya. This fruit has a soft and juicy white flesh and large dark seeds. The juice from this fruit is like that from a watermelon, as it is clear and extremely sticky. I played around with this fruit when we got some last night and it doesn't take heat too well as it browns and caramelizes the sugar inside. It does taste very sweet and tasty.

Anyways, lets see what I have to put up here tomorrow.

A night with Mr. Batali part 2

After a long night of cooking, many good things were made that will provide my family some good food for the week, or at least most of it.

The first thing made was the stuffed celery, which was basically turkey, bread crumbs, parsley, salt and pepper and then made into meatball sized balls. Then they were stuffed into and between two pieces of celery, dredged in flour, then egg, then flour again and fried in a pan until all sides were done. Then they were all put into a pan again and had olive oil, tomatoes, parsley and garlic sprinkled on top and around and cooked, covered for 30 minutes. They were awesome like a great 3 & 1/2 star meal prepared by me.

The next one was the butternut squash pasta which required me to make my own basic pasta dough, then roll it thin in my pasta machine.

I then cut the strips into squares and dabbed a bit of stuffing into each one. The stuffing was two butternut squashes that were cooked in the oven, then mashed together with some parmigiano reggiano cheese, freshly grated nutmeg, salt, pepper and then that was it.

That was cooked in a pot of water and then placed in a pan with fresh sage leaves and butter, where they were coated with the sauce. That dish was good, considering that I think I gave The Stable a 3 or 3 & 1/2 stars for the same item, only mine tasted as good, so that is what I would give myself.


Making foods like this not only helps me learn how to cook new things, but also gives me a better idea of how food should be cooked and taste, when I go to other places.

Mr. Batali is joining us for dinner all week...

Well, not really. What I meant, is that I have all of the week's worth of food for home dinner and work lunch all picked out of Mr. Batali's book:

Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home

Which is a big title on a book, but what is big about it, is the food. 327 recipes is a lot of recipes and while I admit that some of them are as simple as some lightly cooked asparagus in a citrus and lemon garlic sauce, some are also slightly more complicated like recipes asking you to make your own sausage and then your own pasta and combine the two of them together.

With some recipes like a ground beef mixture stuffed into tender cuts of celery or my personal favorite which is cut pieces of veal scallopini with a whole sage leave inside as you fold them over and then bread and fry each piece. Everything in the book, looks good, even the seafood and I don't eat seafood, that much nor like most of it that I have tasted. But, what I can do is try to add a picture on to here as to each recipe I do, from stuffed celery to butternut squash tortelini.

Thank you, Norma...

This past Christmas was spent with my immediate family and my wife's family in Beirut, where her father is from. While there, I had a dessert that was so delicious that I immediately went into culinary overload attempting to deconstruct and figure out what it was made up of.

This delectable dessert was many small cookies, that were filled with pistachios and had a sweet taste to them. The little cookies surrounded a sweet and vanilla fluff. I suggested to the native family members that the cream fluff was marshmallow with a vanilla taste and they all laughed at me, saying it was made from something called "The Root of Halawa". Well, I was sure if I couldn't find this root, that I would be able to make something that came very close to looking and tasting like it. I was given the recipe by a relative and the ingredient was listed as Halawa.

After some research in some culinary books I own, last month I came to the conclusion that this root of Halawa, was none other than Marshmallow. The recipe called for buying this root whole, then soaking it in water for 12 hours after cutting it into small pieces. You then boil the water and mix it with sugar syrup. Then you whisk it all together until it is white and fluffy. The marshmallow seems to have been used first by the Egyptians in desserts and was found in marshy areas. The marshmallow root matches the description word for word and is prepared in the same way.

So, now comes the fun part as the Lebanese person that would enjoy this the most, has diabetes. Like most of my concoctions, this one will be made as close to sugar-free as possible. The flour for the cookies can likely be exchanged with a lower GL flour. I will attempt to make marshmallows for the first time and this attempt will also be following a sugar-free recipe. If I can get the marshmallow creme to work and still be light, fluffy, and tasty, I then should be able to prepare it and plate it in such a way that it may even taste and resemble this Lebanese dessert.

Back to Bravo

Like any restaurant trip, the first impression is important but sometimes a second impression is needed as well. With every chain restaurant, your experience will vary and as weird as it may sound, this is the first location for this chain in the st. louis area so I figured it would be okay to try. I went yesterday with my wife and kids and while a new dish was tried by me and while it was okay as well, we had some horrible service.

The waitress had our table and 3 others and after taking our drink order and the order for the kids because they were starving, she disappeared. She came back with food for the kids, saying something like "I'll take your order in one minute" and went back into the kitchen. She came back though, 20 minutes later. The kids were finished with their food and waiting to go and my wife and I were still waiting to give our order. The waitress finally showed up and took our order as we had to walk the little ones around to prevent them from crying because they had finished and couldn't leave.

While I was in the bathroom with my son, the waitress came back with our food. She insisted that my dish had to go in front of my seat, but in that spot was my drink and a diaper as my wife was waiting for me to come back so she could change the little one. My wife pushed the food out of the way and the waitress pushed it back, knocking into my drink and spilling Pepsi all over my wife's skirt, my littlest son's pants and the stroller. So, I come back and I see the waitress wiping down the stroller and my seat.

My order, a Chianti braised beef ravioli was good, the sauce was a bit too thick and the pasta was good. Probably a 2 & 1/2 out of 5 stars. But as far as our experience, even after the waitress spilled, she didn't take anything off of the bill or even apologize. So, I don't know what to say about Bravo; one bad experience and one good one.