New foods

Food. Boy do I love food. I realize how fortunate I am to be marrying a chef and being here in New York while she goes to school brings added benefits. I get to sample a whole bunch of stuff I have never tried before, which can be a scary proposition, but I am up to the task.

So far she has brought home several things for me to try. It is a little overwhelming but I thought I would relay to you some of the recipes she has learned and what I thought of them.

Risotto: This is a creamy rice dish. The ingredients are simple consisting of rice, asparagus and vegetable stock. It was quite tasty.

Polenta: This consisted of cornmeal, water, vinegar, salt and pepper. This was pretty plain to me, but I must admit I am a fan of sweetened cornbread, so my tastes are skewed.

Millet Croquette: This was presented to me as a small patty and it is used sometimes as a veggie burger. The ingredients are millet, water, toasted ground sunflower seeds, parsley, carrot and soy sauce. This was surprisingly good as well.

Baba Ghanoush. This is my favorite thing she has brought home so far, and it's fun to say. We used it as a dip for chips and as a spread on my chicken sandwich. It is made of eggplant, lemon juice, tahini, olive oil, sesame seed, and garlic. I can't say enough how good this is.

Seitan: This was absolutely delicious. Jenn presented this to me on a skewer as a kabob, as it is a substitute for meat. Amazingly enough this is simply gluten from flour. The mixture is wheat flour, high gluten flour and water. The flour must be kneaded for twenty minutes to develop the gluten. Then it is submerged in water for thirty minutes before rinsing the starch away. After that you put it in a marinade to give it flavor. This is pretty time consuming, but again it was good.

All of the above items were brought home after she made them at school. At home she has made several new dishes, but my favorite was Eggplant Parmesan. I have never liked this in the past, but somehow she made it extremely good. She breaded the eggplant with homemade bread crumbs, used homemade sauce, and topped it off with the fresh mozzarella from the meat market. I can see this as a future menu favorite.

This has been quite a transition for me so far, the former junk food king. I won't lie and tell you I have completely switched my eating habits though. It is just too difficult to ignore all of these pizza places on a daily basis.