foodie meme
Because I like food. Snurched from violetisblue.
What's the last thing you ate? Hummus (homemade with olives and sundried tomatoes) on toasted local sourdough with provolone and local lettuce mix; apples; homemade French lemon cookies; iced peach tea.
What's your favorite cheese? We have a local Leyden (a cheese with cumin seeds) that is awesome. It is my current favorite cheese ever.
What's your favorite fish? One that I've just caught, or that my husband has just caught! Seriously, after living on a sailboat for more than three years, I have a real problem with the commercial concept of "fresh fish." Probably my favorite-tasting fish is bluefish. I also love tuna, both to eat and to catch.
What's your favorite fruit? Wild strawberries and wild blueberries, which are about a thousand times tastier than their domestic cousins. I also really love mango.
When, if ever, did you start liking olives? I don't remember ever not liking olives! Green, black, kalamata, oil-cured, whatever. YUM.
When, if ever, did you start liking beer? I was in grad school, and managed to get a boondoggle project that sent me to the far north tropical part of Australia in their midsummer. It was horridly hot and humid, and people drank a lot of beer in varieties I'd never heard of, and wow, it didn't taste like icky Budweiser or Miller at all! When I returned to the US I tried imported beer as well as the newly emerging commercial microbrews such as Sam Adams and Anchor Steam, and decided I kind of liked beer after all. I'm lucky enough now to live within walking distance of two excellent brewpubs and within bicycling distance of a third. (Well, also a fourth, but I don't like their beer as much!)
When, if ever, did you start liking shellfish? Again, I don't remember ever not liking shellfish. Except for scallops, which I like but don't like me. I was about 20 when I finally made the connection as to why I got violently ill after some meals.
What was the best thing your parent/s used to make? My mother wasn't much of a cook when she got married, apparently, but my father's mother taught her to make the traditional Czech dishes my father loved, and I loved them, too. My favorites were dumplings with dill sauce (which I coerced my mom into making again when I visited a few weeks ago, much to my father's delight as she hadn't made it in years) and this layered chocolate and wafer dessert called Pischinger Torte which is much, much tastier than it sounds. (This looks about like the recipe I remember, except we didn't ice the top; instead the sides would be covered with more of the filling, and then the torte would go into the fridge with a heavy weight on it for several hours to compress it. The result was a very dense cake that had an interesting mouthfeel of crispy wafers alternating with sugar-gritty chocolate. Kind of a gourmet Kit-Kat bar taste.
What's the native specialty of your home town? I can't imagine it has one. More generally speaking, the native specialty of my region of birth is whole boiled crabs with Old Bay seasoning.
What's your comfort food? Cheerios eaten straight out of the box.
What's your favorite type of chocolate? Any good-quality chocolate makes me happy, milk or dark. I like my bar chocolate to be dark with bits of coffee beans, ginger, or orange peel in it. But I also like milk chocolate with toffee bits or hazelnuts or almonds. I always go to Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's second quality sales, held a couple times a year, and load up on dark chocolate mints and truffles for $4/lb. My favorite are their Champagne truffles which are dark inside, coated with white chocolate drizzled with dark, and smell strongly of Champagne.
How do you like your steak? Medium rare. And grass-fed.
How do you like your burger? As above. I also like it on a whole wheat or multigrain bun, with non-iceberg lettuce and tomato and avocado and either a bit of coarse stoneground mustard, or bbq sauce.
How do you like your eggs? As an ingredient. I'm not overfond of eggs, but I will eat them scrambled hard or as an omelet.
How do you like your potatoes? Cut up and oven-roasted with olive oil, rosemary, and black pepper.
How do you take your coffee? Black as sin and hot as hell. I drink it out of a small cup I fill only half-way (three times each morning), so as to keep it as hot as possible. Since I live at 6600 ft., water boils at around 200° and hot beverages aren't as hot as they are at sea level. I actually started drinking coffee as a small child, when my mother gave me an ounce or so in a mug of hot milk and sugar. When I moved out I switched to coffee with lots of milk and sugar, and gradually over the years the adulterants decreased until I was drinking it black, when I was around 25.
How do you take your tea? Hot and plain. Or iced with a little sugar. Or chai-style with lots of milk and raw sugar. My favorite real tea is Lapsang Souchong, but I haven't had it in years. I like the black/green/white teas with fruit flavors, like green tea with mango or white tea with pear. I also like herbal teas, particularly Bengal Spice from Celestial Seasonings.
What's your favorite mug? One made by a local potter, wider at the base than at the top so it doesn't fall over easily.
What's your cookie of choice? It depends on my mood! My go-to cookie for baking is this shortbread recipe. If I have a lot of time and want to make something special, I make some variety of cookies out of this flaky pastry recipe. My favorite store-bought cookie is the amazing "Sow Your Oats" cookie from a local bakery - it's thick with oats, seeds, nuts, and dates, not too sweet, and makes as good a breakfast as it does a dessert. (In fact, I brought one with me and ate it for breakfast before my most recent marathon.)
What's your ideal breakfast? Cookies! No, not really. French toast, made with the sesame semolina bread from that same local bakery, with real maple slurple and fruit.
What's your ideal sandwich? Roasted vegetables and melted cheese and avocado slices and baby lettuces on really good multigrain bread. None of that icky mayo, either.
What's your ideal pizza (topping and base)? Thin crust. Pesto, tomatoes, chicken, and mozzarella. Although actually I can be swayed to pepperoni and mushrooms with tomato sauce easily enough.
What's your ideal pie (sweet or savory)? Any fruit pie or fruit tart; I am not so fond of cream-type pies. Although I like pecan pies. And hate pumpkin pies. If I had to make a choice, maybe sour cherry. For savory I like shepherd's pie.
What's your ideal salad? Mesclun with edible flowers, lemon cucumbers, shredded carrots, dried cranberries, pinon nuts, and a balsamic vinegar or my own speshul seekrit sesame oil and rice vinegar dressing.
What food do you always like to have in the fridge? Does beer count? Butter, local eggs (desperately expensive but you can tell the difference), tortillas, lemons and limes, carrots, bell peppers, onions, garlic, yogurt, cheese, stone-ground mustard, jam, buttermilk powder, yeast.
What food do you always like to have in the freezer? Extra butter and coffee beans, extra bread, Breyer's ice cream, and meat - either local beef or lamb, or elk that B got hunting. At the moment, our freezer is stuffed full of elk.
What food do you always like to have in the cupboard? Flour (white, whole wheat, and whole wheat pastry), sugar (white and brown and turbinado), oil (olive, sesame, and usually canola, although lately I've been using sunflower), vinegar (balsamic and rice), soy sauce, honey, baking powder, nuts, raisins, dried cranberries, dried lentils, couscous, brown rice, thick-rolled oats (for making granola), bread, Ak-mak crackers, Total cereal (for B), tea, coffee, hot chocolate mix (for B).
What spices can you not live without? Cumin is at the top of the list. Also black pepper, garam masala, turmeric, ginger, cinammon, and if we're going into herbs, rosemary and thyme.
What sauces can you not live without? Chipotle sauces, including San Juan Mustard's Alpenglow Orange Chipotle BBQ sauce. Mexican salsas frescas. Also Thai peanut sauce, although I'm experimenting with making my own.
Where do you buy most of your food? City Market (which is a Kroger chain) and the local natural foods co-op.
How often do you go food shopping? Probably twice a week, once to each of the places mentioned above. Sometimes more often. Both stores are walking distance, so I buy only a backpack-load at a time. This has the bonus effect of keeping me in shape!
What's the most you've spent on a single food item? I have no idea. I have spent more than $100 at the RMCF seconds sale, but that was for many, many pounds of a variety of chocolate goodies. For a single, individual item - maybe $35 for a bottle of Grand Marnier? But that's not really food. Oh, I bought a whole cow once for $400. It lived on B's parents' ranch and gave a calf a year, which we got half of (and paid to have it cut and wrapped) when it was slaughtered 18 months later, with his parents getting the other half. But then they got out of the cattle business after we had maybe 4 years' worth of beef.
What's the most expensive piece of kitchen equipment you own? Kitchen-Aid stand mixer.
What's the last piece of equipment you bought for your kitchen? A loaf pan, a springform cake pan, a tarte pan, and a creme brulee set (four adorable little ramekins and a wire frame for suspending them in the water bath). I bought them all at the Linens N Things going out of business sale. If by equipment you mean small appliance, an Escali kitchen scale. I have gotten kind of obsessed with cooking by weight of ingredients lately.
What piece of kitchen equipment could you not live without? Argh. I suppose I could mix things by hand rather than with the stand mixer, and I could always cook beans for hours instead of with my pressure cooker. But I can't make waffles without a waffle iron, and I love waffles, so I guess that's it. Although the wooden stirring thing that's like a wooden spoon except with a flat bottom edge comes a close second.
How many times a week/month do you cook from raw ingredients? Um. Is this a trick question? Every meal, unless we eat out or have leftovers.
What's the last thing you cooked from raw ingredients? Hummus with olives and sun-dried tomatoes. I started with dried chickpeas in the pressure cooker. And I am currently cooking elk chili.
What's your favorite thing to make for yourself? Burritos - saute up some meat and veggies, stick 'em in a tortilla with some cheese, and douse with salsa. Also, I love baking cookies.
What meats have you eaten besides cow, pig, chicken and turkey? Elk, deer, moose (once), pronghorn (once), alligator (once), quail, duck, goose, lamb, goat.
What's the last time you ate something that had fallen on the floor? This occurrence is so unexceptional that I don't take note of it. Probably yesterday. Maybe today.
What's the last time you ate something you'd picked in the wild? Two nights ago! I made a chanterelle and onion sauce to go over our elk steaks. I picked the chanterelles, B shot the elk, and the onions were from a local farm.
Place the following cuisines in order of preference (greatest to least): French, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, sushi, Italian. But there is very little difference among my liking of the top four. And I added Mexican, because it seemed an unaccountable omission.
Place the following boozes in order of preference (greatest to least): whiskey [bourbon or single-malt], rum, tequila,gin, brandy, vodka. Although really, a lot of my preference depends on what they are mixed with. I love gin and tonic on a hot summer's day, but I'm not a big fan of martinis.
Place the following flavors in order of preference (greatest to least): garlic, ginger, lime, basil, aniseed. But I like them all.
Place the following fruits in order of preference (greatest to least): pineapple, cherry, apple, orange, banana, watermelon. Hmmmph, where are all the good fruits?
Bread and spread: The awesome multigrain (or Campagne, or olive) bread from my local bakery, with my homemade hummus.
What's your fast food restaurant of choice, and what do you usually order? I don't eat fast food. I don't think I've been in a fast food restaurant in 10 years.
What are three of the best dining-out experiences you've had? Bergerac, France: a perfect sole filet with capers and delicate white-wine cream sauce, with a glass of local white wine, in a tiny restaurant where the owner was both waiter and cook; Somewhere in the Dominican Republic: B and I were hitching a ride to Santiago with a local family we'd met at a national park, and they abruptly pulled off at a roadside stand and we all had lunch - the most amazing roast pork right off the spit-roasted pig, big hunks of meat we ate with our fingers along with yuca root, and gooey dulce de leche we licked from a bark wrapping for dessert; the fancy restaurant in Cartagena, Colombia, where we ate bacon-wrapped fillet mignon washed down with good red wine as part of a three-course meal which ran all of $25 per person - ah, the days when the dollar was high!
What's your choice of tipple at the end of a long day? Bourbon and ginger ale, usually; or gin and tonic, if it's a hot day, or a glass of good red wine, if it's cold, or some local beer.
Favorite cookbook/s? Google is my favorite cookbook; I can find anything. I don't really use recipes for most things, preferring to cook by feel except for baking, which needs more precision. Probably my favorites are Mastering the Art of French Pastry by Healy and Bugat; Bernard Clayton's Breads of France, and my old standby, the Joy of Cooking (1973 edition).
Got any favorite food blogs? I don't follow food blogs. Oddly.
What's the next thing you'll eat? Elk chili! Elk from our freezer, Anasazi beans from 75 miles or so west of here, dried red chiles from about 100 miles east of here, local onions, tomatoes my brother-in-law grew, and of course cumin, oregano, and a little salt. Maybe I'll make some cornbread to go with it. And we have some Carvers' beer in a half-gallon jug (actually, we had two jugs, and one was down to flat dregs, which also went into the chili).
Okay, off to make cornbread. I hope the foodies on my flist answer this in their journals!
What's the last thing you ate? Hummus (homemade with olives and sundried tomatoes) on toasted local sourdough with provolone and local lettuce mix; apples; homemade French lemon cookies; iced peach tea.
What's your favorite cheese? We have a local Leyden (a cheese with cumin seeds) that is awesome. It is my current favorite cheese ever.
What's your favorite fish? One that I've just caught, or that my husband has just caught! Seriously, after living on a sailboat for more than three years, I have a real problem with the commercial concept of "fresh fish." Probably my favorite-tasting fish is bluefish. I also love tuna, both to eat and to catch.
What's your favorite fruit? Wild strawberries and wild blueberries, which are about a thousand times tastier than their domestic cousins. I also really love mango.
When, if ever, did you start liking olives? I don't remember ever not liking olives! Green, black, kalamata, oil-cured, whatever. YUM.
When, if ever, did you start liking beer? I was in grad school, and managed to get a boondoggle project that sent me to the far north tropical part of Australia in their midsummer. It was horridly hot and humid, and people drank a lot of beer in varieties I'd never heard of, and wow, it didn't taste like icky Budweiser or Miller at all! When I returned to the US I tried imported beer as well as the newly emerging commercial microbrews such as Sam Adams and Anchor Steam, and decided I kind of liked beer after all. I'm lucky enough now to live within walking distance of two excellent brewpubs and within bicycling distance of a third. (Well, also a fourth, but I don't like their beer as much!)
When, if ever, did you start liking shellfish? Again, I don't remember ever not liking shellfish. Except for scallops, which I like but don't like me. I was about 20 when I finally made the connection as to why I got violently ill after some meals.
What was the best thing your parent/s used to make? My mother wasn't much of a cook when she got married, apparently, but my father's mother taught her to make the traditional Czech dishes my father loved, and I loved them, too. My favorites were dumplings with dill sauce (which I coerced my mom into making again when I visited a few weeks ago, much to my father's delight as she hadn't made it in years) and this layered chocolate and wafer dessert called Pischinger Torte which is much, much tastier than it sounds. (This looks about like the recipe I remember, except we didn't ice the top; instead the sides would be covered with more of the filling, and then the torte would go into the fridge with a heavy weight on it for several hours to compress it. The result was a very dense cake that had an interesting mouthfeel of crispy wafers alternating with sugar-gritty chocolate. Kind of a gourmet Kit-Kat bar taste.
What's the native specialty of your home town? I can't imagine it has one. More generally speaking, the native specialty of my region of birth is whole boiled crabs with Old Bay seasoning.
What's your comfort food? Cheerios eaten straight out of the box.
What's your favorite type of chocolate? Any good-quality chocolate makes me happy, milk or dark. I like my bar chocolate to be dark with bits of coffee beans, ginger, or orange peel in it. But I also like milk chocolate with toffee bits or hazelnuts or almonds. I always go to Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory's second quality sales, held a couple times a year, and load up on dark chocolate mints and truffles for $4/lb. My favorite are their Champagne truffles which are dark inside, coated with white chocolate drizzled with dark, and smell strongly of Champagne.
How do you like your steak? Medium rare. And grass-fed.
How do you like your burger? As above. I also like it on a whole wheat or multigrain bun, with non-iceberg lettuce and tomato and avocado and either a bit of coarse stoneground mustard, or bbq sauce.
How do you like your eggs? As an ingredient. I'm not overfond of eggs, but I will eat them scrambled hard or as an omelet.
How do you like your potatoes? Cut up and oven-roasted with olive oil, rosemary, and black pepper.
How do you take your coffee? Black as sin and hot as hell. I drink it out of a small cup I fill only half-way (three times each morning), so as to keep it as hot as possible. Since I live at 6600 ft., water boils at around 200° and hot beverages aren't as hot as they are at sea level. I actually started drinking coffee as a small child, when my mother gave me an ounce or so in a mug of hot milk and sugar. When I moved out I switched to coffee with lots of milk and sugar, and gradually over the years the adulterants decreased until I was drinking it black, when I was around 25.
How do you take your tea? Hot and plain. Or iced with a little sugar. Or chai-style with lots of milk and raw sugar. My favorite real tea is Lapsang Souchong, but I haven't had it in years. I like the black/green/white teas with fruit flavors, like green tea with mango or white tea with pear. I also like herbal teas, particularly Bengal Spice from Celestial Seasonings.
What's your favorite mug? One made by a local potter, wider at the base than at the top so it doesn't fall over easily.
What's your cookie of choice? It depends on my mood! My go-to cookie for baking is this shortbread recipe. If I have a lot of time and want to make something special, I make some variety of cookies out of this flaky pastry recipe. My favorite store-bought cookie is the amazing "Sow Your Oats" cookie from a local bakery - it's thick with oats, seeds, nuts, and dates, not too sweet, and makes as good a breakfast as it does a dessert. (In fact, I brought one with me and ate it for breakfast before my most recent marathon.)
What's your ideal breakfast? Cookies! No, not really. French toast, made with the sesame semolina bread from that same local bakery, with real maple slurple and fruit.
What's your ideal sandwich? Roasted vegetables and melted cheese and avocado slices and baby lettuces on really good multigrain bread. None of that icky mayo, either.
What's your ideal pizza (topping and base)? Thin crust. Pesto, tomatoes, chicken, and mozzarella. Although actually I can be swayed to pepperoni and mushrooms with tomato sauce easily enough.
What's your ideal pie (sweet or savory)? Any fruit pie or fruit tart; I am not so fond of cream-type pies. Although I like pecan pies. And hate pumpkin pies. If I had to make a choice, maybe sour cherry. For savory I like shepherd's pie.
What's your ideal salad? Mesclun with edible flowers, lemon cucumbers, shredded carrots, dried cranberries, pinon nuts, and a balsamic vinegar or my own speshul seekrit sesame oil and rice vinegar dressing.
What food do you always like to have in the fridge? Does beer count? Butter, local eggs (desperately expensive but you can tell the difference), tortillas, lemons and limes, carrots, bell peppers, onions, garlic, yogurt, cheese, stone-ground mustard, jam, buttermilk powder, yeast.
What food do you always like to have in the freezer? Extra butter and coffee beans, extra bread, Breyer's ice cream, and meat - either local beef or lamb, or elk that B got hunting. At the moment, our freezer is stuffed full of elk.
What food do you always like to have in the cupboard? Flour (white, whole wheat, and whole wheat pastry), sugar (white and brown and turbinado), oil (olive, sesame, and usually canola, although lately I've been using sunflower), vinegar (balsamic and rice), soy sauce, honey, baking powder, nuts, raisins, dried cranberries, dried lentils, couscous, brown rice, thick-rolled oats (for making granola), bread, Ak-mak crackers, Total cereal (for B), tea, coffee, hot chocolate mix (for B).
What spices can you not live without? Cumin is at the top of the list. Also black pepper, garam masala, turmeric, ginger, cinammon, and if we're going into herbs, rosemary and thyme.
What sauces can you not live without? Chipotle sauces, including San Juan Mustard's Alpenglow Orange Chipotle BBQ sauce. Mexican salsas frescas. Also Thai peanut sauce, although I'm experimenting with making my own.
Where do you buy most of your food? City Market (which is a Kroger chain) and the local natural foods co-op.
How often do you go food shopping? Probably twice a week, once to each of the places mentioned above. Sometimes more often. Both stores are walking distance, so I buy only a backpack-load at a time. This has the bonus effect of keeping me in shape!
What's the most you've spent on a single food item? I have no idea. I have spent more than $100 at the RMCF seconds sale, but that was for many, many pounds of a variety of chocolate goodies. For a single, individual item - maybe $35 for a bottle of Grand Marnier? But that's not really food. Oh, I bought a whole cow once for $400. It lived on B's parents' ranch and gave a calf a year, which we got half of (and paid to have it cut and wrapped) when it was slaughtered 18 months later, with his parents getting the other half. But then they got out of the cattle business after we had maybe 4 years' worth of beef.
What's the most expensive piece of kitchen equipment you own? Kitchen-Aid stand mixer.
What's the last piece of equipment you bought for your kitchen? A loaf pan, a springform cake pan, a tarte pan, and a creme brulee set (four adorable little ramekins and a wire frame for suspending them in the water bath). I bought them all at the Linens N Things going out of business sale. If by equipment you mean small appliance, an Escali kitchen scale. I have gotten kind of obsessed with cooking by weight of ingredients lately.
What piece of kitchen equipment could you not live without? Argh. I suppose I could mix things by hand rather than with the stand mixer, and I could always cook beans for hours instead of with my pressure cooker. But I can't make waffles without a waffle iron, and I love waffles, so I guess that's it. Although the wooden stirring thing that's like a wooden spoon except with a flat bottom edge comes a close second.
How many times a week/month do you cook from raw ingredients? Um. Is this a trick question? Every meal, unless we eat out or have leftovers.
What's the last thing you cooked from raw ingredients? Hummus with olives and sun-dried tomatoes. I started with dried chickpeas in the pressure cooker. And I am currently cooking elk chili.
What's your favorite thing to make for yourself? Burritos - saute up some meat and veggies, stick 'em in a tortilla with some cheese, and douse with salsa. Also, I love baking cookies.
What meats have you eaten besides cow, pig, chicken and turkey? Elk, deer, moose (once), pronghorn (once), alligator (once), quail, duck, goose, lamb, goat.
What's the last time you ate something that had fallen on the floor? This occurrence is so unexceptional that I don't take note of it. Probably yesterday. Maybe today.
What's the last time you ate something you'd picked in the wild? Two nights ago! I made a chanterelle and onion sauce to go over our elk steaks. I picked the chanterelles, B shot the elk, and the onions were from a local farm.
Place the following cuisines in order of preference (greatest to least): French, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, sushi, Italian. But there is very little difference among my liking of the top four. And I added Mexican, because it seemed an unaccountable omission.
Place the following boozes in order of preference (greatest to least): whiskey [bourbon or single-malt], rum, tequila,gin, brandy, vodka. Although really, a lot of my preference depends on what they are mixed with. I love gin and tonic on a hot summer's day, but I'm not a big fan of martinis.
Place the following flavors in order of preference (greatest to least): garlic, ginger, lime, basil, aniseed. But I like them all.
Place the following fruits in order of preference (greatest to least): pineapple, cherry, apple, orange, banana, watermelon. Hmmmph, where are all the good fruits?
Bread and spread: The awesome multigrain (or Campagne, or olive) bread from my local bakery, with my homemade hummus.
What's your fast food restaurant of choice, and what do you usually order? I don't eat fast food. I don't think I've been in a fast food restaurant in 10 years.
What are three of the best dining-out experiences you've had? Bergerac, France: a perfect sole filet with capers and delicate white-wine cream sauce, with a glass of local white wine, in a tiny restaurant where the owner was both waiter and cook; Somewhere in the Dominican Republic: B and I were hitching a ride to Santiago with a local family we'd met at a national park, and they abruptly pulled off at a roadside stand and we all had lunch - the most amazing roast pork right off the spit-roasted pig, big hunks of meat we ate with our fingers along with yuca root, and gooey dulce de leche we licked from a bark wrapping for dessert; the fancy restaurant in Cartagena, Colombia, where we ate bacon-wrapped fillet mignon washed down with good red wine as part of a three-course meal which ran all of $25 per person - ah, the days when the dollar was high!
What's your choice of tipple at the end of a long day? Bourbon and ginger ale, usually; or gin and tonic, if it's a hot day, or a glass of good red wine, if it's cold, or some local beer.
Favorite cookbook/s? Google is my favorite cookbook; I can find anything. I don't really use recipes for most things, preferring to cook by feel except for baking, which needs more precision. Probably my favorites are Mastering the Art of French Pastry by Healy and Bugat; Bernard Clayton's Breads of France, and my old standby, the Joy of Cooking (1973 edition).
Got any favorite food blogs? I don't follow food blogs. Oddly.
What's the next thing you'll eat? Elk chili! Elk from our freezer, Anasazi beans from 75 miles or so west of here, dried red chiles from about 100 miles east of here, local onions, tomatoes my brother-in-law grew, and of course cumin, oregano, and a little salt. Maybe I'll make some cornbread to go with it. And we have some Carvers' beer in a half-gallon jug (actually, we had two jugs, and one was down to flat dregs, which also went into the chili).
Okay, off to make cornbread. I hope the foodies on my flist answer this in their journals!