Entry tags:
What's the smell of parsley?
[Daily December masterpost. Please feel entirely encouraged to fill in some of the gaps in the calendar. :-) ]
So: flavour.
There are things that are home for me. Parsley (on potatoes or tomatoes or pretty much anything else: I'll eat it finely chopped on buttered bread, given half a chance, or just straight from the plant); black pepper; nutmeg; ground walnuts; poppyseeds; apricots; caraway and rye. If I am homesick or lonely or otherwise sad, these tend to get added to what I'm making. So, for example, my courgette-and-feta fritters contain nutmeg as well as black pepper and spring onion, because it tastes a little like home. (So does my variant of leek-and-mushroom risotto.)
Mostly, though, when I get cravings they're for textures: so set custards are comforting and soothing (creme brulee! trifle!), but often I will find myself really wanting something crunchy and spiky and dry. The best way for me to deal with that sort of thing turns out to be to have a list of known-good foods - for the crunchy/spiky texture, even well-done toast isn't enough; best thing I've found so far is seaweed-rice-peanut crackers. Which - isn't really about cooking, or even about flavour, but I think it's probably worth flagging up that texture is a big thing for me, too. (I do also occasionally get cravings for anything that resembles vegetable matter, but mostly I manage to balance things out such that that doesn't happen.)
-- which leads me on to: how adventurous I am with flavouring depends a lot on how well I'm feeling: if I need something familiar then I don't tend to play around. Otherwise - and especially if I am cooking for guests who enjoy cooking - I reach the stage of adding final seasoning, hand out spoons, and get people to play the what-else-does-this-need game. 'course, it also depends on where I am cooking: if I'm doing that thing I frequently do where I'm going to be living somewhere else for a month or two, so it's not worth buying new spices, I'll tend to carry a small stock with me. The things I take with under such circumstances are:
... and on arrival I will rapidly take an inventory of everywhere local that I can nick sprigs of rosemary out of people's front gardens. Ditto thyme.
In my own kitchen, I always have on hand in addition: Vanillezucker (achieved by storing a vanilla pod in a jamjar I keep topped up with sugar); smoked paprika; honey (for eating and for cooking); oils various (olive, vegetable, walnut); vinegars ditto (balsamic, cider, occasionally ridiculous things if I am feeling flush that month); cumin; coriander; dried chilli; and probably a pile of other bits and bobs I'm currently forgetting because I don't have it to hand so can't check. (One: I am visiting partners. Two: most of my kitchen is still packed up in my parents' house, pending a move to somewhere where I'm not sharing a kitchen with 150 other residents and additionally I'm not paying £50/week for cooked meals twice a day.)
And then in terms of how I cook... nose and ears, mostly. I can't listen to music while I'm cooking, because I'm listening to the food: this really messes me up in shared kitchens, where I'm not in charge of everything on the stove and as such lose track of what's boiling and what's frying and what I need to worry about having boiling dry.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shortcipher continues utterly perplexed by my ability to, from three rooms over from the kitchen, answer his "should we check on dinner?" with "nah, it needs another ten minutes" based on nothing but sound and smell. So flavouring-wise, that I'm constantly monitoring whether something's burning etc based on smell, it's fairly easy to think about seasoning simultaneously. In practice, though, it usually does boil down - in the end ;) - to tasting it and trying to work out which bits of the flavour profile are missing - something I feel very much as an absence on my tongue or at the back of my throat. And from there I know roughly what I usually use to fill in those spaces, and... there we go.
So: flavour.
There are things that are home for me. Parsley (on potatoes or tomatoes or pretty much anything else: I'll eat it finely chopped on buttered bread, given half a chance, or just straight from the plant); black pepper; nutmeg; ground walnuts; poppyseeds; apricots; caraway and rye. If I am homesick or lonely or otherwise sad, these tend to get added to what I'm making. So, for example, my courgette-and-feta fritters contain nutmeg as well as black pepper and spring onion, because it tastes a little like home. (So does my variant of leek-and-mushroom risotto.)
Mostly, though, when I get cravings they're for textures: so set custards are comforting and soothing (creme brulee! trifle!), but often I will find myself really wanting something crunchy and spiky and dry. The best way for me to deal with that sort of thing turns out to be to have a list of known-good foods - for the crunchy/spiky texture, even well-done toast isn't enough; best thing I've found so far is seaweed-rice-peanut crackers. Which - isn't really about cooking, or even about flavour, but I think it's probably worth flagging up that texture is a big thing for me, too. (I do also occasionally get cravings for anything that resembles vegetable matter, but mostly I manage to balance things out such that that doesn't happen.)
-- which leads me on to: how adventurous I am with flavouring depends a lot on how well I'm feeling: if I need something familiar then I don't tend to play around. Otherwise - and especially if I am cooking for guests who enjoy cooking - I reach the stage of adding final seasoning, hand out spoons, and get people to play the what-else-does-this-need game. 'course, it also depends on where I am cooking: if I'm doing that thing I frequently do where I'm going to be living somewhere else for a month or two, so it's not worth buying new spices, I'll tend to carry a small stock with me. The things I take with under such circumstances are:
- black pepper (in a grinder)
- bay leaves
- cloves
- nutmeg
... and on arrival I will rapidly take an inventory of everywhere local that I can nick sprigs of rosemary out of people's front gardens. Ditto thyme.
In my own kitchen, I always have on hand in addition: Vanillezucker (achieved by storing a vanilla pod in a jamjar I keep topped up with sugar); smoked paprika; honey (for eating and for cooking); oils various (olive, vegetable, walnut); vinegars ditto (balsamic, cider, occasionally ridiculous things if I am feeling flush that month); cumin; coriander; dried chilli; and probably a pile of other bits and bobs I'm currently forgetting because I don't have it to hand so can't check. (One: I am visiting partners. Two: most of my kitchen is still packed up in my parents' house, pending a move to somewhere where I'm not sharing a kitchen with 150 other residents and additionally I'm not paying £50/week for cooked meals twice a day.)
And then in terms of how I cook... nose and ears, mostly. I can't listen to music while I'm cooking, because I'm listening to the food: this really messes me up in shared kitchens, where I'm not in charge of everything on the stove and as such lose track of what's boiling and what's frying and what I need to worry about having boiling dry.
shortcipher continues utterly perplexed by my ability to, from three rooms over from the kitchen, answer his "should we check on dinner?" with "nah, it needs another ten minutes" based on nothing but sound and smell. So flavouring-wise, that I'm constantly monitoring whether something's burning etc based on smell, it's fairly easy to think about seasoning simultaneously. In practice, though, it usually does boil down - in the end ;) - to tasting it and trying to work out which bits of the flavour profile are missing - something I feel very much as an absence on my tongue or at the back of my throat. And from there I know roughly what I usually use to fill in those spaces, and... there we go.
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I am v. fussy about crackers! Tho I love Ryvita (idk if one differentiates crackers from crispbreads?) quite a lot. I think most of my food cravings, snackwise, tend to be sweet, but I have been known to actually crave Ryvita, heh.
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Crispbreads are amazing in general, yeah. Ryvita cravings are v rare for me, but stick some in front of me and I'll likely inhale it.
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What you said about crunchy texture resonates for me. I often munch on raw carrot or even ice. I tend to prefer my food a little undercooked for this reason (and being vegetarian makes this much less of a health hazard).
I have a ton of rosemary drying in my laundry at the moment--more than I could use. I wish you lived close by so that I could give it to you.
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There's a rosemary bush in my mum's garden, so I'm generally not in short supply when I have My Stuff around me, but -- thank you so much <3
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I also have a crunchy texture craving, best if also salty. As I move away from simple carbs, looking for crunch is part of what I do.
And I don't cook with my ears much, but I cook with my nose all the time.
And I need a cooking icon!
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I keep thinking I ought to have a cooking-related icon that isn't just noldo-and-I-are-entertained-by-vegetables...
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