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penfieldThe other day I was talking with a coworker about doughnuts, and I mentioned that it was my fourth favorite food. She seemed surprised that I had thought it through so fully. "Your fourth favorite?" she asked. "What's one through five?"
I repeat it here:
1. Pizza
2. Ice Cream
3. Pasta
4. Doughnuts
5. Jambalaya
Perhaps you already see where I'm going with this. Each item on this list varies in its degree of specificity. "Jambalaya," for example, is as specific as you can get. One chef's jambalaya may differ from another's in terms of ingedients, herbs, spices and the like, but it is essentialy the same basic dish prepared essentially the same way. "Pasta," on the other hand, is incredibly vague. We could be talking about anything from fettucini alfredo to pan-roasted pumpkin risotto.
"Pasta? Can you be more specific?"
If you're talking about my favorite kind of noodle, I'd have to go with linguini, which combines the flavor and texture of a flat noodle with the tenderness of a thin noodle. But I also admit that linguini does not always lend itself to certain sauces; marinara and other tomato-based sauces are probably best suited for cylindrical pasta, while cream and butter sauces blend better with flat pasta. More complex shapes like ziti and bowties can be festive but are not generally as versatile.
To tell you the truth, I think I probably like tortellini better than linguini, but tortellini in itself is sort of a pasta hybrid, and I'm not really comfortable calling it a noodle. I'm also not allowing lasagna into the discussion. Lasagna is a big flat slab of flour and barely qualifies as pasta, much less a noodle. And besides that, lasagna would not crack my top 100 favorite foods.
But perhaps the specific kind of noodle is not specific enough. Pressed for an actual recipe, I suppose I would go with cheese tortellini with vodka sauce. I would also consider linguini al scampi, ideally with some shrimp. But does the presence of shrimp turn it from a pasta dish to a seafood dish?
All ice cream, at least, shares essentially the same properties. But flavor does make a big difference. My favorite flavors are mint chocolate chip and cookies n' cream, although dairy engineers at the Haagen Dasz Institute are coming up with new flavors by the minute. It's probably not long before they introduce "Jambalaya N' Cream." But is "mint chocolate chip" really an ice cream flavor, or is "mint" the flavor, with chips mixed in? Put another way, at what point do bits and pieces floating in the ice cream become part of the flavor? Is it a flavor only if it is commercially packaged as such, like "Rocky Road," which doesn't make specific mention of the crunchy bits? Or is it a separate flavor even if I personally crumble my Girl Scout Thin Mints into my vanilla ice cream? (Highly recommended, by the way.)
If we determine that ice cream and its mix-ins are separate, and I have to choose a "base" flavor, I have to put myself down as a vanilla guy. I think that, generally, there are vanilla people and there are chocolate people. Vanilla gets a bad rap in the public arena, it seems. When they want to describe something as boring or average, they call it "vanilla," whereas people brag about their hometown being "chocolate city." I prefer the flavor-next-door sweetness of vanilla to the sultry intrigue of chocolate. But Halle Berry can come over for dessert anytime.
My grandfather -- before his heart attack -- used to mush up chocolate donuts in his vanilla ice cream for a delicious summertime treat. I spell doughnuts as "donuts" very deliberately in that sentence, because I am referring to the chocloate-frosted Entenmann's donuts that are made with dough inasmuch as Grape Nuts are made with grapes. In college, they were the only doughnuts available at the on-campus convenience store, though from a dietary perspective they were not so much convenient as they were opportunistic. My suitemates and I referred to them as "evil donuts" because of their ruthless, vise-like grip on our hyperglycemic appetites. In terms of this list, though, I lump them in with the more traditional time-to-make-the-doughnuts doughnuts.
Evil donuts aside, I again have to align myself with the more conservative glazed and fried-cake standards than the more decadent devil's food cake or any of the insouciant jelly-filled varieties. I am a big fan of the cinnamon roll, commonly found with its doughnut cousins, but I don't think we can classify it as a doughnut since it doesn't have a hole. That spins us off into the whole doughnut-danish debate, which I'm not going to get into here because I don't want to bash any foreign cultures, even if they do sometimes combine cheese with their sweets, which I think is a mistake.
(As an aside, I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this, but cheesecake, conceptually, is dumb. Cheese does not belong in desserts. Don't even get me started on carrot cake, which makes about as much sense as broccoli ice cream.)
Jambalaya, way over on the other end of the taste spectrum from doughnuts, is about as specific as you can get. There is little room for variety. For example, there are approximately one billion restaurants in New Orleans, each one serves jambalaya and in each place it tastes essentially the same: awesome.
It is, of course, a rice-based dish. On a fundamental level, rice is perilously close to pasta, and in fact I know of at least one restaurant that serves a "pasta jambalaya" entrée, which is magnificent but gives me headaches when I think about classifying it. In any case, even at No. 5 it is very close to being at the top of the list; I would probably prefer it to some kinds of pasta (like pan-fried pumpkin risotto) or even some kinds of pizza (Papa John, I'm looking in your direction).
I realize that my list does not suggest a very health-conscious diet. There must be people out there whose top-five lists include spinach salad or rice cakes. I admire the discipline and Spartan lifestyles of these individuals, but I would almost definitely not want to hang out with them. Their Super Bowl party would probably suck.
But don't worry too much about me. I think I'm still relatively healthy, and I'm certainly not sick yet. And even if I was, the frightening level of detail in which I've examined this subject implies a mental illness far more dangerous than the calorie count in my pepperoni pizza.
I repeat it here:
1. Pizza
2. Ice Cream
3. Pasta
4. Doughnuts
5. Jambalaya
Perhaps you already see where I'm going with this. Each item on this list varies in its degree of specificity. "Jambalaya," for example, is as specific as you can get. One chef's jambalaya may differ from another's in terms of ingedients, herbs, spices and the like, but it is essentialy the same basic dish prepared essentially the same way. "Pasta," on the other hand, is incredibly vague. We could be talking about anything from fettucini alfredo to pan-roasted pumpkin risotto.
"Pasta? Can you be more specific?"
If you're talking about my favorite kind of noodle, I'd have to go with linguini, which combines the flavor and texture of a flat noodle with the tenderness of a thin noodle. But I also admit that linguini does not always lend itself to certain sauces; marinara and other tomato-based sauces are probably best suited for cylindrical pasta, while cream and butter sauces blend better with flat pasta. More complex shapes like ziti and bowties can be festive but are not generally as versatile.
To tell you the truth, I think I probably like tortellini better than linguini, but tortellini in itself is sort of a pasta hybrid, and I'm not really comfortable calling it a noodle. I'm also not allowing lasagna into the discussion. Lasagna is a big flat slab of flour and barely qualifies as pasta, much less a noodle. And besides that, lasagna would not crack my top 100 favorite foods.
But perhaps the specific kind of noodle is not specific enough. Pressed for an actual recipe, I suppose I would go with cheese tortellini with vodka sauce. I would also consider linguini al scampi, ideally with some shrimp. But does the presence of shrimp turn it from a pasta dish to a seafood dish?
All ice cream, at least, shares essentially the same properties. But flavor does make a big difference. My favorite flavors are mint chocolate chip and cookies n' cream, although dairy engineers at the Haagen Dasz Institute are coming up with new flavors by the minute. It's probably not long before they introduce "Jambalaya N' Cream." But is "mint chocolate chip" really an ice cream flavor, or is "mint" the flavor, with chips mixed in? Put another way, at what point do bits and pieces floating in the ice cream become part of the flavor? Is it a flavor only if it is commercially packaged as such, like "Rocky Road," which doesn't make specific mention of the crunchy bits? Or is it a separate flavor even if I personally crumble my Girl Scout Thin Mints into my vanilla ice cream? (Highly recommended, by the way.)
If we determine that ice cream and its mix-ins are separate, and I have to choose a "base" flavor, I have to put myself down as a vanilla guy. I think that, generally, there are vanilla people and there are chocolate people. Vanilla gets a bad rap in the public arena, it seems. When they want to describe something as boring or average, they call it "vanilla," whereas people brag about their hometown being "chocolate city." I prefer the flavor-next-door sweetness of vanilla to the sultry intrigue of chocolate. But Halle Berry can come over for dessert anytime.
My grandfather -- before his heart attack -- used to mush up chocolate donuts in his vanilla ice cream for a delicious summertime treat. I spell doughnuts as "donuts" very deliberately in that sentence, because I am referring to the chocloate-frosted Entenmann's donuts that are made with dough inasmuch as Grape Nuts are made with grapes. In college, they were the only doughnuts available at the on-campus convenience store, though from a dietary perspective they were not so much convenient as they were opportunistic. My suitemates and I referred to them as "evil donuts" because of their ruthless, vise-like grip on our hyperglycemic appetites. In terms of this list, though, I lump them in with the more traditional time-to-make-the-doughnuts doughnuts.
Evil donuts aside, I again have to align myself with the more conservative glazed and fried-cake standards than the more decadent devil's food cake or any of the insouciant jelly-filled varieties. I am a big fan of the cinnamon roll, commonly found with its doughnut cousins, but I don't think we can classify it as a doughnut since it doesn't have a hole. That spins us off into the whole doughnut-danish debate, which I'm not going to get into here because I don't want to bash any foreign cultures, even if they do sometimes combine cheese with their sweets, which I think is a mistake.
(As an aside, I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this, but cheesecake, conceptually, is dumb. Cheese does not belong in desserts. Don't even get me started on carrot cake, which makes about as much sense as broccoli ice cream.)
Jambalaya, way over on the other end of the taste spectrum from doughnuts, is about as specific as you can get. There is little room for variety. For example, there are approximately one billion restaurants in New Orleans, each one serves jambalaya and in each place it tastes essentially the same: awesome.
It is, of course, a rice-based dish. On a fundamental level, rice is perilously close to pasta, and in fact I know of at least one restaurant that serves a "pasta jambalaya" entrée, which is magnificent but gives me headaches when I think about classifying it. In any case, even at No. 5 it is very close to being at the top of the list; I would probably prefer it to some kinds of pasta (like pan-fried pumpkin risotto) or even some kinds of pizza (Papa John, I'm looking in your direction).
I realize that my list does not suggest a very health-conscious diet. There must be people out there whose top-five lists include spinach salad or rice cakes. I admire the discipline and Spartan lifestyles of these individuals, but I would almost definitely not want to hang out with them. Their Super Bowl party would probably suck.
But don't worry too much about me. I think I'm still relatively healthy, and I'm certainly not sick yet. And even if I was, the frightening level of detail in which I've examined this subject implies a mental illness far more dangerous than the calorie count in my pepperoni pizza.
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Re: Pizza
Date: 2006-09-21 07:59 pm (UTC)Re: Pizza
Date: 2006-09-25 02:22 pm (UTC)