Food Pilgrimage

I love a good food party. There are a number of approaches: the first is the carefully planned, elegant dinner party. The second is the social/finger-food party. This second type is really good if you pick your food right. Crepes are good for this, as you can just have a bunch of fillings, like cheese, caramelized onions, veggies, chocolate, etc, and everyone can just go crazy. Taco parties can be similarly fun.

The final type of food party is the one I like most, but requires some like minded friends to be the most enjoyable. This is the food-pilgrimage. You go on a quest to find divine inspiration in the holy grounds of the farmers market, or the health foods store, the local cheese shop, or anywhere where people care passionately about the food they are selling. You go without premonition or preconception about what you are going to cook, the journey will tell you.

Today I went on a pilgramage with my flatmate Gabe, and we headed to the Ferney-Voltaire farmers market, and the local cheese shop. We bought the following: blood oranges, avocadoes, herloom tomatos, pasta with black truffle, local asparagus, chicken, and fresh bread. Some nice looking pears for a tart too. Oh and the cheese... We got some gruyer that I think we will use for a black trumpet mushroom cream sauce to serve with the chicken, asperegus and pasta. But then just as a treat, we also got a raw milk brie ripened with truffles inside! And a delicious blue cheese blue de le something or rather (Bleu d'Auvergne). It was creamy smooth and the right amount spicy/pungent, like a good stilton.

So we had a wonderful lunch of the fruit, bread and cheese, and coffee. Tonight we will feast! The last step of the food pilgrimage often involves figuring out how to cook everything, but I feel up to the challenge. I'm going to go for a run now, just to prepare my appetite, but I will let you all know how it goes!

Alchemy and Spices

Some parts of cooking are largely chemistry: baking for instance, is helped by quite precise quantities of ingredients which cause vital reactions to occur: browning/caremelization, rising, are all wonderful pieces of precise microbiology.

Spices... are not really like that at all. Their character varies wildly based on how they grown, what variety they are, how finely they are ground, how fresh they are, not to mention what they are mixed with! Brown mustard seeds, toasted whole, are pleasantly nutty and mild and are often used in curries. Lightly crushed they impart a similar but more robust flavor to whole grain mustard, perfect for vinaigrettes. Finely grind those suckers, and add just the smallest bit of water to make a paste, and you've got seriously delicious fire at your fingertips!

For this reason, you should only ever take the spices given in recipes as a rough guide. Instead, smell your spices and know their flavor, taste them, and taste your dishes. This is not just chemistry, this is art. I divide spices (and herbs) roughly into two categories: those that easily blend with other flavors, and the misfits, that are delicious, but can fight for dominance with some other flavors, and must be used more carefully. Here are a few of my favorites (a limited list for now).

Friendly spices

• Coriander: My absolute favorite, this has a delicate, lemony floral aroma, a bit of nuttiness but none of the bitterness of its frequent partner in crime: cumin. It is delicious in EVERYTHING. I'm serious. A bit of oregano, coriander and chili pepper, are great for a tomato sauce. Creamed soups: coriander. Savory baked goods? Coriander. Really. Everything.
• Black Pepper: Fresh ground pepper has a lovely flavor of pine and earth (grind some into olive oil to taste its flavor at its most vivid).
• Sweet Pepprika: Doesn't go in everything, but has a nice sweetness that goes with tomato sauces well.
• Chili Peppers: Not true for all chilis (particularly not smoked ones), but used with a light touch, a bit of spice can lift a dish without being obtrusive to the other flavors.
• Others: parsley, dill, celery seed

Assertive Spices

• Cumin: With peppers or onions, this gives a rich bitter sweet flavor that is one of my favorates, but is not subtile.
• Sage: Delicious and dangerous, very good with winter squash, but too much can easily ruin a dish, and it clashes with other strong flavors (like cumin or chipotle, for example)
• Others: Cardomom, mint, actually most spices are in this category. I'd recommend focusing on one at a time when playing around.

Middling: Mustard, cinnamon, nutmeg, thyme. These spices have a lot of friends that they work well with, but fight with some others.

By the way, I have been cooking, but I thought it would be more fun to just think about spices tonight. So I indulged myself. I had fun, I hope you did too. Let me know if you liked it, and how you think about food! Goodnight.