11.10.2014

In Search of Superego Style Food

Fettuccine with smoked salmon & vodka cream sauce. Looks like slop, tastes like heaven.
Fettucine with smoked salmon & vodka cream sauce.
[Image: a pile of flat noodles topped by chunky red
sauce, in a beige bowl with black curlicue accents]
I am not a great cook. But I am really good at making food that I really like to eat. As you might suspect, this can be a problem. I need to make food that I don't like to eat so much.


Take this pasta. It looks like slop, yes? It's actually heavenly. It happened because of an ingredients fiasco: I brought home a package of Coscto chanterelles -- so thrilled was I to see them after two years of drought, two years sans those tasty fungi at either our local bulk goods warehouse or in Seymour's secret foraging spots -- but discovered upon starting to cook my favorite brandy cream chanterelle sauce pasta that the mushrooms were not usable. Thankfully we had smoked salmon and of course we had vodka (see again: Costco), so I tried smoked salmon vodka cream sauce pasta instead.

It was to die for. Seymour, who has been working looooong hours on his team's fabulous big questions science video project, nearly fainted with happiness upon coming home from a too-busy-for-lunch workday and finding that dinner was creamy stinky fish noodles (the man is half Portuguese, so stinky fish = always a win).

I really liked our dinner, too. Which was, as mentioned before, a problem (had two servings, needed one). I really need to start cooking more bland food. Food that serves our nutritional needs and makes us want to eat it, but that doesn't make my Id tell my Superego she's a whiny little bitch who can kiss her ass. Suggestions?

4 comments:

  1. Ugh. When you find out let me know. My solutions for dealing with good food lately tend to be (a) making slightly less in the first place, although this does leave you with strange amounts of dried pasta left over. (b) remembering that I want to save some for lunch the next day, and so being parsimonious with seconds for both myself and others and (c) if it is a pasta/vegetable dish doubling or tripling the amount vegetables suggested and cutting back on the pasta or meat for a stew. Note this only works on things like fresh tomato pasta, broccoli or cauliflower pasta. Not so much on the vodka cream salmon sauce. Oh does that sound good!

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    Replies
    1. Good suggestions. I am working on the "one serving only, sister" option myself.

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  2. I also struggle with this, but I have found that if I take the time to dish out single portions for lunch first I tend to eat a bit less at dinner. It doesn't always work and sometimes I will eat a couple of those lunch portions ahead of time - but it is a thought.

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    Replies
    1. Any suggestions are appreciated! Thanks you.

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Respectful disagreement encouraged.