Eight Food Things

This latest food meme comes from Charlotte's Web, where Charlotte has been presiding over a long weekend baking extravaganza and setting everyone drooling with the aromas pervading the blogosphere.

Eight Food Things:

What are your favourite foods?

Besides dark chocolate? Fresh line-fish, roast lamb and roast potatoes, ripe avocado on bread with a dash of sun-dried olive paste, prosciutto crudo, home-grown strawberries and mulberries, anything someone else has cooked for me, pastry anything, marmalade, chocolate biscuits…

What foods do you hate?

Kidneys, salt-cod, anchovies

Foods you like but are embarrassed to admit:

Peanut butter and jam, Smarties, English chip-shop chips, left over chocolate butter icing…well how embarrassing is it really, to admit to an immature palate?!

Strangest food you’ve eaten and enjoyed?

Snails were fine but overrated. Probably, through lack of recent exposure to exotic cuisines with strange animal parts, the award goes to my own power-cut invention Scrambled Quiche, which experiment has yet to be repeated.

Cooking failures that still rankle?

My subconscious has deliberately blotted them out. I know there are some but the details elude me, it was obviously too painful to contemplate!

Ingredients you don’t want to consider living without?

Olive oil, garlic, butter, flour, sugar, lemons, onions, instant yeast, cocoa, oats, salt, tomatoes, wine.

Cuisine you’d like to know more about?

Asian. I wish I were more confident in whipping up a thai green curry. For some reason I'm also very hesitant about cooking with fish at home, though it is the first thing I choose in a restaurant, probably due to the reason listed below.

Foods you’ve hated but have grown to love?

Fish. As a child fish meant steamed cod for school lunch, the smell of it permeating the whole school(or so it seemed to me) . I spent the whole morning, through lessons, dreading lunch time and would even feign illness, to avoid having to face the white flaky lump that would make me gag, as I tried to swallow down the minimum requisite portion with copious glasses of water. Now I love fish - grilled, braaied, fried, sea food and all - and it is what I usually choose when we go out for a meal..not boiled cod though, ever ever ever, and preferably not in white sauce either.

Vinegar. I never really liked very strong, sour flavours, until my second pregnancy when I craved chips with vinegar. Since then I actually like the tang in French dressing, pasta sauce and if I ever eat proper chippie chips.

Current kitchen conundrum?

I'm lucky enough to have the kitchen I always dreamed of, with plenty of counters and a big long table that stretches down the room and amalgamates with the sitting room, to accommodate anything from five to fifty. The only downside I can think of, is that we have no extraction system so if I burn something (which of course is a rare event, unless the computer lures me away from the stove… OK it happens every other week) in the absence of containing walls, the whole house smells of it.

Otherwise the main oddity is the towering stack of empty yoghurt pots leaning like the Tower of Pisa next to the sink, because they are so useful that they really ought to be reused and recycled. Except, when do I think I am ever going to use up 200 empty yoghurt pots?

You're tagged if you want to be.