Have you ever seen a vegetable that you thought was truly beautiful?  Such was the case with these enormous poblano peppers Blaine brought home from Food 4 Less.  No, they weren't organic AND they were still fresh and strong with skins so green they were almost black.  I literally couldn't wait to get them on the grill and between layers of pepper-jack and tortillas de maize.  I was almost giddy at the thought of my special poblano tostados...

Have you ever opened-up Yahoo and had the head-line forever change what you will and won't eat?  Such was the case this past Thursday with a headline that said something like "Seven foods the experts won't eat".  Out of the seven, only farmed-salmon and microwave popcorn were already on my "no how, no way" list.  Corn-fed beef, non-organic apples and non-organic milk were on my list of "things I'd really prefer to avoid".  Canned tomatoes and non-organic potatoes were things I had never even thought about.  (Who knew that potatoes are sprayed with something nasty to keep them from sprouting and that the acid in tomatoes causes the aluminum of the can to leach out?) 

How about mushrooms?  How much have you contemplated the extreme mystery of shrooms and what they do for the planet?  Towards the end of Omnivore's Dilemma, there's a whole chapter devoted to mushrooms and, as someone who spent hours hunting Chantrelles over Thanksgiving, I was blown away by the depth and fascination of the topic.

So I guess this is the way one evolves from a person who hates to feed herself (either out or at home) to someone who loves and honors food:  one recipe at a time, one bit of new information at a time, one understanding at a time.

It is in this spirit, I offer the ten things I learned about food (and myself) this week:

1.  What a flavoring agent is.  This sounds relatively simple but it's anything but.  These nasty-little toxins trick the brain into perceiving flavors that really aren't there.  The bullion which (up until this week) I would use to make all my soup stocks with is one example...there's nothing that came from a chicken or a cow yet the flavors of the stuff it provides are enormous.  

2.  MSG is a flavoring agent, it is toxic, it very likely could be causing some of my health issues and the labeling of it is extremely confusing.  MSG could be included in the words "natural flavors", "spices", hydrolized protein or autolyzed yeast.  "No added MSG" is not the same as "No MSG".     

3.  A week or two ago, I posted a learning along the lines that soup is pretty dang easy to make from scratch and this week I learned that learning was a crock.  Soup is easy to make from scratch when one uses bullion or a store-purchased stock but now I get that's really not making it from scratch.  Duh.

4.  Kneading bread is a blast.  Who knew?  

5.  When making something completely unfamiliar, it's truly okay to trust and follow the dang recipe.  In some cases, recipes really ought to be more than mere suggestions.  

6.  It's okay to use the dishwasher.  I've become so frugal with energy I recycle paper-towels and, in-spite of reading about the efficiency of energy-star appliances, rarely use the dish-washer.  In all the cooking and baking I did this week, I came to the conclusion that out-dated belief needs to be thrown right out the window. 

7.  A lot of people I know can.  I always thought canning was something completely old-fashioned that only boring people do.  Wrong.  I hope next year, I'll be graced with a garden bountiful enough to justify doing it myself.

8.  The box that breakfast cereals come in is more nutritious than the cereals themselves!  (Let me know if you want my sources for any of this)

9.  Making food with the "N factor" used to take a lot of effort.  Now, even though it still takes about the same amount of time, it feels like I'm only putting a fraction of the effort out.  I think a huge part of this is that I've become accustomed to spending that much energy preparing food so my perception of what "a lot" is has changed. 

10.  The pursuit of the "N factor" is more than just a fad in my life.  I just keep getting pulled deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole.  (The "N factor" is my made-up term for food that feels like it really nourishes my entire being.)