Food and More Food

When I say everyone in our family loves food, I mean we care about what we eat and we are always willing to learn more about our food. Min, an accomplished amateur cook, was with us for the Christmas/New Year week and we had lots of cooking sessions and interesting discussions.

As a Christmas present, Min bought me a copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma (by Michael Pollan). The author wrote about corn in our diet, whether products with the organic label really follow real organic farming theory and the meal that uses only local produce (hunted, gathered or grown by the author himself). I have not finished reading but would be very interested to read about the Organic farming part.

We experimented with various ways to cook our food. We came up with two versions of macaroni and cheese. And we had two roast days! Cookies baked, vanilla french toast served... I can still taste the steak with blue cheese melt in my mouth.

We spent a long time to analyse the diet for Bear, the family dog. What he can eat and what he should eat. Where to get the bone for him to chew on. I gotta make sure there's NO onion or grapes in Bear's dish.

And of course we went out to restaurants to try out food that are not easy to re-create at home.

Everyone at home got REALLY upset when one of the protective rain gear we made for the chili pepper plants was "borrowed" by someone else (and later left on the driveway and the cleaning lady put it in the trash collection station). We didn't care about the cost and time to remake the rain gear. We worried about the rain killing the budding chili plants! One of them is a Jalapeno and took us two trials to have fruit!

If there is one thing that makes everyone at home happy and united, it is food. We don't need to go to expensive restaurants at all. We just want to know where our food is form, how it is prepared, when is the best time to eat and how to improve the taste and texture.

I feel sad when I see people paying a premium to stuff their face with sub-par food. Just remember one thing, the amount of food we can take is subject to our metabolic rate. Some people may have a bigger appetite than the others but there is a limit. Why be stupid in using such precious quota???