Quote Originally Posted by Daisy and Delilah View Post
Also: What the heck are udon noodles??? Are we, as home cooks, supposed to know the difference when seeing them in a dish, as opposed to linguini, vermicelli, spaghetti, bla bla bla? What happened to the simplistic part of the concept of the NFNS?
I can honestly say I've never heard of them.
It's pasta spelled with two vowels and two letters?

One major peeve I have with the FN is the way they use/describe some of the ingredients.

Chorizo is two different things. In Spain it's a hard sausage-in Mexico it's a pork soft sausage that comes in a casing you have to remove before you cook it.

Some of the 'fad' Tex Mex fusion foods I never heard of, and I was raised on Mex food. Chipotles? Either canned or powdered, that must be a recent invention. Blue corn tortillas, meal or chips are a 'gourmet' offering-pricey when you come across the products.

---------------

I was watching a cooking show where they were comparing olive oil. One brand was almost 50 dollars a liter. 200 a gallon!
Truffle oil or any flavored oil that's used in a recipe will cost you a pretty penny, if you can find them!

Tamarind paste? I love Thai food and wanted to cook up some Pad Thai. I had to search for a few weeks before I had all the ingredients for the recipe.

We recently got a Philipino/Chinese/Vietnamese/Japanese super market nearby. Lychee nuts? Looooong green beans? Tamarind? glass noodles? EVERYTHING!I feel really lucky because here in El Lay you can find pretty much anything. Not so easy in some parts of the country.

I am sure that most of the viewers have wanted to make a recipe they saw on the tube and were stymied by that one ingredient that they will never find on the local supermarket shelves.

We don't get a substitute option-and I can see why because of some of the recipes are really specific as to the taste or preperation-but sometimes the food and ingredients are way too pretentious to even think about preparing.

------------

And then there are the recipes/ingredients that make me wonder.

Honey is the new go-to-ingredient. Like the mango salso, chipotle- powdered and canned, cumin and adobo it shows up in everything. Taste any tomato product and try to taste the tomato over the sugars! I have to dump a can of hot tomato sauce into my spaghetti because the sweetness is so cloying,,

That is one reason that the nation is overweight and diabetic. Enough of the honey!

Recipes? I caught the end of a program-I think it was a R Ray trainwreck and she was serving up a rice, cooked in red wine and garnished with grapes. It looked like the scat of the Flying Purple People Eater!

------------

LOL, my last rant is about Protein, Savory and Sweet!

When I hear those terms I think about my biology/physiology classes. I think about a fricking DNA strand when I hear protein and see the picture of a tongue with the sweet/sour/bitter areas outlined on it. Food should be a simple pleasure-you eat what you like and want.

People like Alton Brown are interesting-but I don't need a primer on food and the chemical effects of a marinade breaking down the muscle fibers in flank steak.

Sometimes knowing too much science about food isn't the best way to go!