Food

by Jon Sullivan - 2023-03-27 - Food

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I haven't been taking enough photos of my food lately. Which is very off brand for me. Let's fix that.

Today's photo isn't great. But it's one of the first photos I've taken of food I cooked since I got to Oregon. Prawn curry, tandoori chicken, and homemade garlic naan. It was okay. But the lack of fancy dishes worthy of photos, and the lack of a proper studio set up here, and distracting adventures, and general laziness, have combined to make the "food I cooked" photo category pretty small lately. Certainly well short of what it was the last two years. We can blame Covid being "over" for a lot of that. Lockdown = more cooking. But I do miss having more food photos.

Obviously, I do cook fancy stuff here. But mostly for friends. And letting everyone's food get cold while I hover over it with a camera, and futz with lighting, isn't proper etiquette. So I guess the solution there would be to cook more photogenic meals while I'm alone, rather than the soup based diet I typically adhere to. And I have a huge pile of new recipes to work through as well. My master recipe for pozole rojo. A mushroom take on eggplant parm. Pomegranate lacquered salmon. Mashhurda soup. Tofu sloppy joes. Irish lamb hand pies. Pecorino cod piccata. And might as well try a wild mushroom piccata while we're at it?

If I'm honest it's just too easy to get lazy and cook good soup. So...... Let's add a step - Stop being soup lazy.

Combining photo adventures with restaurant exploration is also a problem. If I'm going 100 miles from home (everything is 100+ miles from Eugene) I'm also going to want to find a great new place to eat out there. And anything even vaguely near Portland means I need to try one of the 50+ restaurants and truck pods I have on my list. And the food trucks in Portland are irresistible. But...... I should stop making eating out my only foodie experience. I can cook all that stuff cheaper anyway.

Which brings up another factor. I keep thinking I should deep dive some narrow type of food to find the "best of" like I did with tacos in San Diego. I think for western Oregon that food might be fish & chips. Since I've moved here I've had both the worst and best (for the US, we don't count Ireland, which is it's own category) fish and chips I've ever had. So that would actually be a valuable list. For the record, the worst was at a McMenamins where they served me some dreck that had obviously been pre breaded and frozen, and then fried without thawing so that the batter was mostly raw. It was more like chips and crunchy raw batter. I felt miserable for having finished it. McMenamins is fun, but the food seems to have gone right in the toilet during Covid. And I'm one of those idiots who tells the server it's good even when it's awful. Thankfully, so many other places here do it right.

And there is also the Solstice food throwdown to prepare for. We're still working on a theme, but test recipes need to get underway soon. So I guess I'll be cooking more.....

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