Posted by Jim at March 17th, 2006

I’m interested in food. Specifically I’m interested in ethnic foods. A country’s cuisine is the product of its available resources. The types of food used in a cuisine’s dishes comes out of the environment (all around the Mediterranean Sea people eat lots of fish). The techniques used to cook the food come out of the availabilty of tools to cook with–wood, coal, metal pots, stoves, clay ovens…

As a result of personal interest then, I end up cooking a fair amount of Mediterranean foods (particularly Morrocan, Provencal, Lebanese and some Greek foods), Indian, and Thai. There’s also a certain amount of old favorites from my own childhood (roast, burritos, various soups…) and sometimes vegetarian (I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t think meat is a necessity in every meal).

There’s also a bit of Peruvian cuisine, but that’s mostly because Kristen once bought me a Peruvian cookbook.

I sometimes wonder what the effect of growing up with this sort of menu will have on my kids’ perspective on food. I get a glimpse of this every so often. On Thursdays, the school one of my daughters goes to has hot lunch, allowing her to eat something I haven’t made.

On Wednesday night, we had beef in spinach sauce–an Indian curry. My daughter ate it enthusiastically. On Thursday at school, she had mini-corn dogs. She removed the outer covering, but ate the hot dog inside.

Spinach based sauces with strange spices are okay, I guess, but hot dogs with a covering around them are just too weird.