Friday open thread: food opinions (on a Saturday)

[dolorosa_12]

I've got chicken stock bubbling on the stove, using the bones leftover from Christmas dinner, I'm eating leftover roast vegetables for lunch, and I'm slowly making my way through the Yuletide collection. (I think after writing this post I'll switch over to Madness, as I'm more in the mood for shorter fics.) My aim this year is to write substantive comments on at least 50 fics in the main collection, and at least 20 in Madness (although the latter may depend on what fandoms are represented). I saw myself described on an anonmeme as a 'fantastic recipient,' so now I feel a huge amount of pressure to live up to that!

I paused my regular Friday open thread yesterday as I figured that many people in my circle would be otherwise occupied, but I didn't want to let a week go by without it, so here we are with a prompt from dhampyresa: what food do you wish more people would give a chance?

(I want to get this out of the way first, though: people have restricted diets for all kinds of reasons, so I don't want the comments in this post to descend into judgement of people's dietary choices or preferences. I'm operating on the assumption that responses are directed at people who have adventurous diets, ample disposable income to spend on food, the time available to cook, should they want to, and do not have disabilities that might affect their ability to buy or prepare food.)

I don't actually really have an answer for this — there's not really any foodstuff that I feel is unfairly maligned, since people's food preferences tend to be very personal and idiosyncratic. I suppose the one thing I might say is marzipan. There are a lot of people in anglophone countries whose first experience of marzipan is the terrible, synthetic-tasting stuff that gets used as icing on wedding cakes. This tends to create an unfavourable impression, so I wish more people had the opportunity to try the good stuff.

I suppose that's my answer more generally: I hope people give a second chance to items of food that they first encountered in bad-quality iterations, because usually when something is cooked/prepared well, it has something to recommend it!

What about you?

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

I've never understood the point of meat substitutes. If I want the taste and texture of meat, I'll eat meat, and if I don't want to eat meat, I want to eat a meal which is designed specifically to require no meat — not a previously meat-filled meal with the meat removed or substituted. And you're right, tofu is often the prime culprit for ill-fitting meat substitutes; I've also seen it used as a substitute for scrambled eggs, which sounds really unappealling.

And now you've made me crave agedashi dofu!