Food Confessions

 RHYS BOWEN: I confess—I am not a foodie. I never will be. In fact when it comes to food I am unadventurous in the extreme. I suppose it comes from an upbringing in England in the postwar years when things were scarce and most meals involved large amounts of starches with a sliver of meat. But I still enjoy many of those things: steak and kidney pie, sticky toffee pudding, fish pie, fish and chips, shepherd’s pie. They are all favorites.

Of course now that we are diet-conscious I rarely eat them. A treat when I am in England is to have one of them, but I rarely cook them. But on the whole I go for healthy simplicity: poached salmon with asparagus. Roast chicken with crispy roast potatoes.  Things that don’t require enormous amounts of preparation (which is why the food delivery service HelloFresh did not work out for me)

Perhaps I have an underdeveloped palate but for me certain flavors go together and others don’t. I remember arriving in America and finding the mixture of sweet and savory to be odd. Pancakes with syrup and sausage and bacon? Turkey with biscuits and honey? I guess I’ve learned to like them better over the years but still not my favorite.  I suppose we are all a product of our upbringing and the food that tastes best to us is what we remember from home.  If ever I’m sick I want my mom’s chicken stew.

 I’ve been to my share of very fancy restaurants but I can’t say I’ve gone into ecstasies over raw oysters with wilted kale and wasabi.  This is why I’ve never put myself on the waiting list for The French Laundry and paid several hundred dollars for their tasting menu, signing up for dishes you won’t know in advance. ( On a side note my daughter called me once in flat panic. She had made friends with a woman she met in a play group and invited her and her husband to dinner, only to find he was one of the chefs at the French Laundry. What can I serve? She asked in distress. I said he’d probably enjoy something totally simple like pizza for a change!)

I don’t want it to seem that I am rooted in the dishes I know and won’t try anything else. I do enjoy good Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Italian, French food. These are all tried and true flavors developed through centuries in the various cultures.  I've been brave enough to eat octopus broiled on a Greek quayside, or escargot in France.

It’s the new experiments of flavor parings that I can’t handle.  I remember once being taken to dinner at a new and very avant-garde place in Manhattan. I chose the rabbit. I have a small appetite but when the dish came it was one rabbit leg, standing upright with four stalks of asparagus making a teepee around it. Five mouthfuls of food then it was over.  My table companion was not as lucky. He ordered liver. When he cut it blood gushed across the plate. He called the waiter and said his liver was still raw. “That is how the chef chooses to prepare it,” the waiter said, looking down his nose.

“But not how I choose to eat it,” said my companion. It was whisked away in anger.  Not my sort of restaurant!

So what about you? Are you adventurous in your eating? When you go to a restaurant do you find yourself ordering the same dishes over and over (I know that I do this). Have you discovered new weird and wonderful parings that actually taste divine?

LUCY BURDETTE: I’m not as adventurous as Hallie, for example, who will try about anything. But I sure do love to eat! No liver, no kidneys, no gamey meat for me, and I don’t want to see tentacles. Those animals are smarter than we are. Ditto for pork, though it’s delicious, I try not to eat it. Most vegetables, almost all cheeses, count me in for that. Fried chicken and waffles with syrup--now that could sound like an odd combination. But in fact it’s marvelous!

RHYS; Lucy , I feel the same about pork, unless it comes from a free-range farm

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Cottage cheese mixed with applesauce. I cannot tell you why, but it is DELICIOUS,  and it doesn't taste like either of the ingredients. Brie with fig jam.  Celery with peanut butter, but I guess that’s a staple. Bacon and peanut butter-- I know Jenn is a fan, too.  Lisa Gardner taught me about hamburgers with mayonnaise--I KNOW it sounds terrible but it’s just--different. 

Snails, fine, oysters fine (basically a red sauce conveyance.). NO tentacles. And I know people put ketchup on scrambled eggs, but I cannot fathom why. (Lots of food talk around here lately, huh?) 

JENN McKINLAY: I am adventurous! I mean I regularly eat cake for breakfast and I live down the street from one of the first chicken and waffles restaurants in the country. I love brie and fig jam, Hank! I’ve never tried cottage cheese and applesauce but I happen to have both. I will give it a try. 

I’m truly  up for anything - especially if I don’t have to cook it. Octopus soup, bring it on. You get used to the tentacles curling in your mouth. Really, you do. Rattlesnake? Sure. It tastes like chicken -- make sure you have lots of ranch dressing on hand. And if you’re serving amuse bouche - just make sure to keep them coming. It takes a lot of those little suckers to fill a gal up. 

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am definitely adventurous and there are few things I won't try at least once.  Well, I'm not too keen on the idea of rattlesnake, so maybe I would pass on that one. I'm okay with sampling new flavor combinations if I go to a fancy restaurant, but with the places that we eat regularly I have to admit I will get the same thing over and over, so call me a stick-in-the-mud on that front.

I was a little leery of the smoked eel I was offered at a fancy London restaurant, but I tried it and it was fabulous!

RHYS: Oh, smoked eel. I had that once on the Baltic Sea in Germany. Fabulous.

HALLIE EPHRON: I’m very adventurous… though not a huge fan of kale and I won’t eat octopus (they’re too smart). I draw the line at macaroni and cheese ice cream, a new product recently brought to you by Kraft. No how no way. 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I would say I’m adventurous in trying new types of cuisines - and considering I was raised as a WASP in the 1960s and 70s, almost everything not made with Cream of Mushroom soup or Jell-O counts as a new cuisine! I mean, I never had a bagel until I went to college… I agree with Hallie on octopus, and I’m increasingly aware of the environmental impacts of some of my food choices and am changing accordingly. 

Oh, and I must confess I have real “white woman mouth.” Thai, Sichuan, Indian - I always have to ask for the most mild spice. I’m pretty sure babies in Mexico who have been recently introduced to solid foods can handle hotter dishes than I can.

RHYS: So, dear Readers--who likes tried and true and who is adventurous? Who has discovered an amazing new paring? And who orders the same thing every time they go to a restaurant?