Food glorious food...

I like food. 

I like food a lot. 

I like to eat it, cook it, watch TV shows about it, etc... I do not, however, consider myself a real "foodie". I say that primarily because I don't feel that I actually like the taste of enough foods to be considered a "foodie". 

I don't like cucumbers at all. No raw onions or peppers. Got sick on sushi once and haven't been able to return to it, although I love Japanese food in general. Cilantro tastes like soap...and apparently the new trend is to put cilantro on EVERYTHING. I went to an Italian restaurant the other night and was going to order some tomato bruschetta until I saw that it was topped with a cilantro pesto. What the heck? It's Italian...use some basil!

Anyway, being in a big city, I use sites/apps like Urbanspoon and Yelp a lot to help me/us find new, good places to eat. What I've noticed in a lot of the reviews, though, are what appears to be an over abundance of people that consider themselves real "foodies". Some I would even venture to call "food snobs". People that give reviews as though they've been working alongside Thomas Keller for the past five years. 

"The wine was good, but I felt that it was a bit warm...perhaps kept at 65 degrees instead of 62. The ceviche was not as authentic as what I had when we visted southern Mexico last year...to much acidity. It was apparent that the bread had not been baked that day, it was probably left over from yesterday. The herbal notes from the chicken dish that wafted my nose were exhilarating, but I was soon disappointed upon my first bite when the herbal scents did not have a juxtaposition in the dish, it begged for a creamy sauce of some sort."

Okay, that wasn't an actual quote...but that's just an example of the type of stuff I read. Seriously. 

Real food created by a chef is a true art form, and like a lot of other art forms...I'm self-aware enough to understand that just because I don't necessarily care for it, doesn't mean that it's bad! I just know what NOT to order next time. 


My other irk lately is the use of the word "authentic". More and more, I'm coming to the conclusion that there isn't much that is actually "authentic". And that's okay! 

Take tacos for instance. I bet you money that if you travel Mexico and visit small towns in the North, East, South, and West...no two tacos will be alike. Each version is influenced by the people and the ingredients on hand. There might be ones that you prefer over the others, but that doesn't make any of them more or less authentic. (Obviously, I'm excluding the likes of Taco Bell from this discussion.)


Last little food vent...As most of you know by now, Kyle works in the food service industry, and so he gets to see and eat a lot of really neat things...almost daily. What I don't like about this is when he sends me pictures of his lunch. 

His lunch looks like this:

My lunch looks like this: 

Even though I'm not a big sushi fan, I think you can see my frustration ; )