This Is Just To Say: Fucking Around With Carrot Chips

In the cabinet I found these old vegetable chips I got from Fairway that I was trying to foist on Mr. Kiddo at one point about four months ago: sweet potato, squash (zucchini), taro and carrot. I got this notion to look up (again, because I will never, ever remember) what carrots go with in Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus. Found two right off the bat (indeed, I switched to baseball after Game 1 of the NBA finals): cardamom and hazelnuts. The cardamom tasted good (whole shaved with microplane) as did the hazelnuts. You could do a high-concept trail mix and blow minds probably.

This Is Just To Say: Garam Masala In Meatballs

I make meatballs pretty frequently, mostly because, duh, they’re good but also because the boys both will totally eat them. I try to think of stuff that I can goof around with that won’t necessitate scuttling dinner, because that would be disastrous, so I keep the experimentation within a safe orbit.

So this last time I went into Niki Segnit’s The Flavor Thesaurus and worked the angle of tomato, being that we were eating pasta with meatballs in tomato sauce. Sure enough, a lot of the components of garam masala are in there for tomatoes: anise, cloves, nutmeg — like ketchup, I guess. So, anyway, I figured we should try it. It worked. It was good. I would do this again and again, in fact.

This Is Just To Say: Tomato and White Pepper

I have to say, I’ve felt guilty about not using enough white pepper. I first learned about white pepper from The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual, which talks about using that instead of black pepper because of their French culinary this or that (a partial explanation here). White pepper has a weird, specific flavor that sort of reminds you of a closet but will also be immediately recognizable if you eat Chinese food. I’ve wanted to appreciate it. I’ve forced myself to use it. I’m not sure I always like it.

But then I had this piece-of-shit out-of-season takeout salad tomato the other day — the kind that Jen would never touch and which she usually throws away. I was just goofing around with and decided to eat it — dutifully using white pepper, of course — and, holy moly, the flavors worked really well together. I googled it to see if I could see why and couldn’t find anything, so then I saved this draft and forgot about it. Anyway, it’s really good. If anyone can explain it, let me know.