Content tagged with "food"

Baba Ghanoush
Explanation
September 8, 2021
131

A Lebanese food, which is essentially hummus made with eggplant, rather than chickpeas. Common ingredients are mashed eggplant, olive oil, lemon juice, and other seasonings. It is consumed in a similar way as hummus – as a dip, or spread on bread. I was looking for hummus in Costco, and found some…

Chicken Fried Steak
Explanation
May 26, 2024
156

Not surprisingly, it’s beef. Specifically, it’s “cube steak,” which is round or sirloin that’s flattened by pounding it with a meat tenderizer. So it’s not a “natural” cut of beef – it’s processed a bit . I’ve eaten this before, but it didn’t really taste like beef to me. I sort of thought it was…

Cruciferous Vegetables
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
January 4, 2022
112

A family of vegetables. The most common members are: These are “true vegetables,” unlike other foods such as corn, potatoes, and peas which people think are vegetables but actually fall into other categories . Basically, when a nutritionist says, “Eat more green, leafy vegetables,” these are the…

Dal
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
133

The Asian name for split legumes, or for soups made from these. Split pea soup, for example, is a form of dal. You can make a dal from any split, boiled legume. For no reason at all, I bought a box of “Indian Coconut Squash Dal” from Costco. It was spectacular – kind of a thick soup which I ate by…

Fold (Cooking)
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
September 8, 2021
339

This is the process of combing two fluid substances of different thicknesses together my inserting a spoon into the bottom of the heavier mixture, pulling some to the top and over the lighter mixture. I found an article which explained it: Folding is a very precise term in cooking and baking. It…

Gizzard
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
November 21, 2021
121

This is an organ found in birds and some other creatures. It’s a type of “pre-stomach” that grinds food, since birds don’t have teeth. Some birds actually swallow stones which stay resident in their gizzards to help break food down. They are prepared as food all around the world. They are a tough,…

Hero Sandwich
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
May 11, 2024
111

This is just a submarine sandwich by another name, it turns out. This seems to be a regional New York term, dating from the 1930s . It’s not related to what’s in the sandwich, just the general concept of a long, cylindrical roll. There was a NY Times Connections puzzle which grouped the words “bun,”…

Masala
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
January 2, 2024
151

This specifically refers to the mix of spices in Indian food. However, there is also idiomatic usage meaning “mixture” or “co-mingling.” In The Shortest History of India, it was used idiomatically twice: Not officially recognized by also becoming ubiquitous is “Hinglish” – a masala of Hindi and…