There are many foods out there that just don’t work or are misapplied. Here is my personal list which shows up all of my food prejudices. All correspondence will be entered into.
- Bircher muesli. I love a bowl of porridge in the morning with some poached fruit. I even like uncooked oats in muesli. But I don’t understand bircher muesli. It is a soggy, mess with the consistency of puppy’s vomit. The texture is soft and cold and it adds nothing to starting the day on a good footing. In the spirit of ‘never waste a meal’, let us never waste another breakfast on bircher muesli.
- Shop bought pesto . Pesto is easy to make. Whiz up some fresh basil, toasted pine nuts, parmesan and garlic with olive oil. It is the taste of summer. It is meant to come from the garden to the plate. All of the life goes from pesto as soon as it is bottled. It is not a food that keeps so is not suitable for commercial production and must be laden with preservatives to give it a shelf life. Avoid that bottle and make your own.
- Soft shell crabs. My friends assure me they are delicious and I just haven’t a good one. If that is the case, there are a lot of bad ones out there. My first concern is provenance. As far as I can see they are imported from developing countries with no food regulation and appear to be harvested from lagoons flowing with raw sewage and industrial waste. My second concern is taste. When I bite in, all I get is a mouthful of crab gunk. Is there no meat in these things? And what about those icky, little legs. Until provenance is clarified, I recommend sticking to locally harvested seafood.
- Aoli. Aoli falls into the misapplied category. It is everywhere and way too much of it. I am always trying to scape it off my lunchtime sandwich. The place I go to has a particularly nasty anchovy version which does nothing to enhance the flavour of a ham and salad roll. I will give it the benefit of the doubt and accept it may work on the end of a hot chip. A lot of people seem to like that, though a sprinkling of salt does it for me. Hopefully the aoli mania is peaking and we can go back to a nice mayonnaise.
- Brawn. And really I mean anything gelatinous, but brawn can stand for the genus. Meat and jellyness don’t go together. It is the slippery and cold elements which don’t work for me as well as the indistinguishably of the meat used. Meat is best, grilled, baked or casseroled. Suspending shreds of pig’s ears in jelly is way too Depression-era for me.