Food Spaz

Hi I'm Darcy, and I like weird food. (Hi Darcy!)

I'm trying to eat healthier so I'm thrilled when I find a good-for-you (or just not bad for you) food I dig. My newest discovery is large curd cottage cheese. Before you go yuck, let me say I dislike normal cottage cheese just like you. But (Kroger brand) large curd is WAY different. Chunks of cheese the size of feta coated in a delightful creamy sauce. No icky texture or bad tang. I am eating way too much of it straight out of the carton. It's great in place of sour cream in things like mexican food too. Or mix it with diced dried fruit, nuts, a dash of honey, and smear it on bread. Then pop it under the broiler and it's like blintzes or cheese danish in just a minute. I'm doing it for breakfast tomorrow.

I also have OCD (Obsessive Canning Disorder). Two summers ago I handpicked and canned 40 pounds of pears. I find it deeply fulfulling to cook food, seal it in jars, and eat it later. I started a garden just to give me more produce to can. I am a "suburban forager", gathering raspberries, blackberries, pears, crabapples, and anything else I can harvest for free to fulfill my canning obsession. I tend to can unusual foods, and found I adore pickled fruits. It started with pickled watermelon rind, then pickled peaches, pickled crabapples (a mistake, I later discovered), and pickled cantaloupe. Frikkin Awesome! (Thanks for the vocab expansion K!) The fruit flavor mixed with "warm brown" seasonings (cinnamon, allspice, clove) and a sharp bite of acid. Yum! If anyone wants to try some, just ask, I've got tons. Especially in the summer I pore over any resources I can find for new canning recipes. I just wish someone (Alton Brown maybe?) would put out a technical scientific book on canning, to explain odd rules like draining off and reboiling a pickling solution before pouring it back on the pickles 5 straight days prior to canning. Especially when another recipe for the same thing just calls for an overnight soak in the pickle solution. In the heat of canning season I buy vinegar by the gallon, 10 lbs. of sugar at a time, and frequently have the entire stove going and 2 hot plates outside to cook stinky things (like garlic scape - pepper relish).

But the effort and mess and scalds are worth it, when you sit back and listen for the first Plink! that lets you know a jar just sealed shut. It always sends a little thrill through me to hear jars plink shut. And when, after months on a shelf, you open a jar and taste the food inside, you're instantly transported back to summer. In part because the food still tastes so fresh, and partly through memory association. Every time I taste my corn relish I remember the sweltering high 90s weather, me sweating out on the porch stirring a witches brew of vinegar, cabbage, peppers, corn, and strong spices, trying not to inhale the vapors as it simmered. Then the thrill when my dad (who I made it for) tried some and told me it was just like he remembered from when he was young.

So far I've only found two people who share my love of these unusual foods and happily try anything I put up. We all love beets too, maybe too much. One is my dad. The other was Annie. She and I were always eyeballing each other's lunches and sampling the oddities the other brought in. I really miss her, and whenever I make or find some new unusual food I still always think of bringing some in to work for her to taste. Aleha Ha-shalom Annie, my enthusiastic food spaz partner.