Food and Drink
Since I never post anything, I thought I'd trying doing evelynne's prompts for a bit. Today's is food and drink.
I was a picky eater as a kid, and this has simply decreased, uniformly, over time, to the point that today there are almost no foods I don't like. (It took me until college to eat Chinese food, later in college to like beans, and years afterward to enjoy any vegetables... the very last food to come off the "ick" list was actually lettuce, which everyone always said had no taste but which to me always tasted quite strongly, and badly.) I suppose I'm still not super-fond of curries, but even then I find them okay, just not really my thing.
Conveniently, this has gone hand-in-hand with developing cooking as a hobby. I started doing it a couple of years ago -- cooking as a challenge & hobby instead of "I need something to eat, what's in the fridge?" -- and found that as long as I stuck to yellow recipes and above, I enjoyed it. [Yellow recipes? Yes, I think of cooking in World of Warcraft terms, wherein recipes show up in colors based on their difficulty compared to your current skill. Grey recipes are easy enough you learn nothing, green ones you'll learn from occasionally, yellow ones are at your skill level, orange is difficult at your skill level (almost guaranteed to skill up, but may fail to make it), and red is impossible at your skill level.] I still don't really like making super-easy things, like food out of a package, as I just find it boring and time-consuming.
The net result of this is that over the last few years,
anjelabug and I have pretty much stopped eating packaged food. I cook more often than she does, and I pretty much shop for things with one ingredient whenever possible. Since we both love French and Mexican foods, I end up doing a lot from those cuisines. I really should do more seafood and Asian foods, I just don't have much experience with them -- I did make some very nice grilled fish earlier this week, though.
I end up cooking a lot of variety, but I don't need variety necessarily. For lunch on the weekdays, when I'm at work, I end up having tacos probably 4 days out of 5. I vary what exactly I have in the genre of "Mexican food," but it's almost always some variant of tacos, burritos, quesadillas, etc. I like the fact that at a fast-casual Mexican place (like Chipotle or a local chain called Ooba's) I can get a meal made entirely of food without any processed ingredients.
The one drawback of food: not being overweight is a challenge when one loves food. I've spent pretty much my entire life (starting at age 8) overweight, save for a period of about a year a couple years back. I do a lot of exercise, and have been counting calories for many years now, in order to at least keep my weight constant. One thing that makes this easier is that I don't really care about dessert and junk food -- sweets don't generally tempt me unless they're actually sitting right in front of me. What makes it harder, on the other hand, is wine.
anjelabug and I got into wine as a hobby in about 2008. It turns out that Washington is a great place for it, and the center of Washington wineries and wine tourism is... Woodinville, where we live. As a result, a lot of our selections of what food to eat is determined by what will go with our favorite wines -- I think this is why I don't cook much fish. On the other hand, since we now have a reason for
anjelabug to avoid wine for several months, it's an opportunity to try cooking different, less-wine-compatible things, so we're taking advantage of that.
This entry was originally posted at http://fishsupreme.dreamwidth.org/68987.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I was a picky eater as a kid, and this has simply decreased, uniformly, over time, to the point that today there are almost no foods I don't like. (It took me until college to eat Chinese food, later in college to like beans, and years afterward to enjoy any vegetables... the very last food to come off the "ick" list was actually lettuce, which everyone always said had no taste but which to me always tasted quite strongly, and badly.) I suppose I'm still not super-fond of curries, but even then I find them okay, just not really my thing.
Conveniently, this has gone hand-in-hand with developing cooking as a hobby. I started doing it a couple of years ago -- cooking as a challenge & hobby instead of "I need something to eat, what's in the fridge?" -- and found that as long as I stuck to yellow recipes and above, I enjoyed it. [Yellow recipes? Yes, I think of cooking in World of Warcraft terms, wherein recipes show up in colors based on their difficulty compared to your current skill. Grey recipes are easy enough you learn nothing, green ones you'll learn from occasionally, yellow ones are at your skill level, orange is difficult at your skill level (almost guaranteed to skill up, but may fail to make it), and red is impossible at your skill level.] I still don't really like making super-easy things, like food out of a package, as I just find it boring and time-consuming.
The net result of this is that over the last few years,
anjelabug and I have pretty much stopped eating packaged food. I cook more often than she does, and I pretty much shop for things with one ingredient whenever possible. Since we both love French and Mexican foods, I end up doing a lot from those cuisines. I really should do more seafood and Asian foods, I just don't have much experience with them -- I did make some very nice grilled fish earlier this week, though.
I end up cooking a lot of variety, but I don't need variety necessarily. For lunch on the weekdays, when I'm at work, I end up having tacos probably 4 days out of 5. I vary what exactly I have in the genre of "Mexican food," but it's almost always some variant of tacos, burritos, quesadillas, etc. I like the fact that at a fast-casual Mexican place (like Chipotle or a local chain called Ooba's) I can get a meal made entirely of food without any processed ingredients.
The one drawback of food: not being overweight is a challenge when one loves food. I've spent pretty much my entire life (starting at age 8) overweight, save for a period of about a year a couple years back. I do a lot of exercise, and have been counting calories for many years now, in order to at least keep my weight constant. One thing that makes this easier is that I don't really care about dessert and junk food -- sweets don't generally tempt me unless they're actually sitting right in front of me. What makes it harder, on the other hand, is wine.
anjelabug and I got into wine as a hobby in about 2008. It turns out that Washington is a great place for it, and the center of Washington wineries and wine tourism is... Woodinville, where we live. As a result, a lot of our selections of what food to eat is determined by what will go with our favorite wines -- I think this is why I don't cook much fish. On the other hand, since we now have a reason for
anjelabug to avoid wine for several months, it's an opportunity to try cooking different, less-wine-compatible things, so we're taking advantage of that.
This entry was originally posted at http://fishsupreme.dreamwidth.org/68987.html. Please comment there using OpenID.