A fussy foodie’s adventures beyond comfort food
It’s time for another Daring Bakers challenge, but I’m going to have to take a pass this month, for the first time since I joined last July. The recipe—for Cheesecake Pops, from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey
Be sure to check out the Daring Bakers blogroll to see hundreds of beautiful cheesecake pops, though.
So Nolan is a month old now, and I’m still not getting in the kitchen much. Between pumping and feeding and changing diapers and the like, it’s hard enough finding time to brush my teeth, much less plan and cook a meal. So we’ve been keeping it simple: Freezer meals, quick-cooking stuff from Costco, donations from visitors and take-out runs by hubby have been pretty standard for the past few weeks, but I’ve squeezed in a few items, and if I can sit down long enough sans-baby to write up some posts, I’ll fill you in.
For now, I’ll point you in another direction. Last February, I decided to make masaman curry for Jeremy’s birthday. My pantry, however, is decidedly of the Italian bent, and I wasn’t about to go buy everything I’d need to toast and grind and smash in order to make fresh curry paste, since I don’t actually like curry. Jeremy loves it—particularly the masaman—and has been trying to get me eating curry for years, but it’s just too spicy for my palate (both in the ay-caliente sense and the volume-of-spices sense). What I did instead, as you can read in the original post, was purchase a packet of premade masaman curry sauce from Curry Simple. Couldn’t be easier—you just stir-fry all the meat and veggies you like, pour the sauce over everything until it is warmed through, and serve it with rice. I got a large packet, reasoning that curry freezes well and Jeremy could eat to his heart’s content and then save the remains for later meals. However, it actually turned out to be the only curry I have ever met and liked: well-balanced, slightly sweet, and not spicy at all.
After Nolan was born, I was racking my brain for easy meals, and that curry sprang to mind. Soon several more packets of sauce were winging their way to our doorstep, and we ate masaman curry for several meals this past week. I make mine with just slices of chicken breast, boiled red potatoes, and roughly diced onions, and it only takes as long to make as the rice takes to cook. It just keeps growing on me: it’s only been a few days, and I’ve already found myself wanting to bust open another package (which sort of amazes me, I must say). And as an extra bonus for new moms, according to my wonderful doula, the spices in curries are also beneficial to lactation!
Anyway, please continue to be patient with me! Here’s what I’m dealing with:
Update 4/27/08: Last night’s dinner was yellow curry, from the small packet we received as part of a current promotion. I used shrimp, onions and green peppers in it; we thought it was tasty and it was mild enough for me to eat without drinking gallons of water, but I think the masaman curry is still our favorite.
Update 5/3/08: More masaman curry with chicken and potatoes for dinner last night. I think we may be getting addicted! We’ve already gone through the order we placed after Nolan’s birth, so I ordered even more this morning: More masaman, of course, but Jeremy talked me into trying the red and green curries also, even though they are spicier.
Update 8/14/08: Last night’s dinner was yellow curry with chicken, potatoes, onions and bell pepper. I ate mine way too fast because the baby was fussing, and burnt my tongue pretty thoroughly, but what I could taste of it was very good. 
I want to try making the yellow curry with some leftover tilapia we have in the freezer, but Jeremy is anti-tilapia due to associating it with his kidney stones a couple weeks back.
I remember making deviled eggs for the first time when I was a little kid. I was an incredibly picky eater (what? really?), but deviled eggs were definitely on my list of eatables. So at some point I decided to try making them myself. I knew where my mom’s recipe was, so I pulled it down while the eggs boiled (20 minutes at a hard boil, eek! No wonder the yolks always turned gray around the edges.) and opened it to the right page.
I knew deviled eggs had mustard in them because I had watched my mom make them before. It gave me pause when I first found out, because I don’t use mustard as a condiment, even today, but the taste of the eggs was so wonderfully creamy that I just tried not to think about the contamination while I was eating them. But it was a different story when I went to make the recipe myself.
I happily sliced eggs and popped out the very hard-boiled yolks with a spoon, mashing them up with Miracle Whip, cider vinegar and salt. I pulled the squeeze bottle of mustard out of the refrigerator and spent a long while contemplating whether or not I should leave it out. Would it really make any difference if I did? In the end, I convinced myself that the mustard was in the recipe for a purpose (though what that might be I couldn’t imagine). I made myself squeeze a blob of day-glo yellow mustard into the measuring spoon, accompanied by a trickle of watery liquid that made my nose wrinkle in disgust, and plopped it into the egg yolks. I stirred it through as quickly as possible to put the whole traumatic experience behind me, scanned the yellow mush for heterogeneous streaks of mustard, and stuffed them back in the whites with a sprinkle of ancient paprika for the final touch. Cautiously nibbling my first bite, I was pleased to discover that they tasted just like my mom’s deviled eggs, wonderfully creamy and salty with an edge of vinegar tang and not a bit of mustard taste to be found.
That moment, I believe, was the origin of the Persnickety Palate. Even though I have continued to be—and am to this day—a very picky eater, that moment was the first time I willingly put an ingredient I didn’t like into a recipe and had faith that I might still be able to enjoy the outcome. It was a small step because I already knew I liked the taste of deviled eggs, but the fact that I was making them myself—controlling the amount of the abhorrent ingredient and the ultimate flavor of the dish—gave me the confidence to proceed. And that is what the past few years of cooking have been about for me.
Not that I am always happy with the outcome of my personal culinary adventures—there have been many meals that I ended up eating only a few bites of. But I have also taught myself not to be afraid of trying so many new foods that the successes are totally worth the disappointments. Among the ingredients I am no longer afraid to use? Mustard, of course. I don’t use the day-glo sort in a squeeze bottle, just Dijon and whole grain; and I still don’t use it as a condiment. But it frequently pops up in many other capacities in my kitchen, and I think I am a better cook because of it. I might even have to try making my own mustard one of these days.