There’s no more insufferable supper companion than a food snob: You know, one of those folks who sit around and complain that the sauce is too bright and the roux too bitter, or that the onions should have been allowed to sweat rather than brown.
But hey, there’s something to be said for the power of their palates, their ability to pick up cues and vocalize what they’re tasting from the muddle of flavors in the mouth. (Even if, as I sometimes suspect, they just think they can.) I’m not talking about “super tasters” — those few who physically have more taste buds than the rest of us — but the eaters and cooks who always seem to know just what it is they’re eating.
How do they do it? And more importantly, other than spending $60,000 on a culinary degree, could I train myself to do it, too? I put the question to experts who should know: a tongue doctor, a chef or two, a sommelier and a flavor chemist.
Breathe, Damn It!
I start with the doc, naturally: Andrew P. Lane, an otolaryngologist — he studies the head and neck, that is — who directs the Johns Hopkins University Sinus Center.
On a daily basis, says Lane, patients complain to him that they’ve lost their ability to taste, which, sad to say, does indeed decline with age and the influence of a growing number of prescription drugs. Those very real problems aside, Lane often starts by telling clients just what he tells me: There’s the technical ability to taste, and then there’s what we perceive as flavor.
Our tongues are equipped to experience only salty, bitter, sour and sweet flavors, plus umami, a newish term we borrowed from the Japanese to define a savory tasting sensation.
“But that’s not really the flavor of food,” Lane says. Flavor — the citrusy essence of lemongrass, that lusty smokiness of chipotle peppers — comes mainly via our nose, he says, and largely through what’s known as retronasal or orthonasal smelling.
In other words, when you take a bite of food and chew, some aromatic compounds go into your mouth and back up into your nasal passages: “You may not even think you’re smelling,” says Lane, “but you are.”
Ever seen a wine taster — olive oil, beer and cheese geeks do it too — swish their wine around in their mouths and suck in air over their tongues? It’s all about getting those aromatics back up into their noses.
Obviously, smoking and sinus problems hamper your retronasal capabilities, but by the same token you can potentially boost your skills by going whole hog with your breathing and slurping … though you might look super-silly at the Olive Garden in the process.
Develop a Pantry of the Mind
But if your brain doesn’t recognize what it is your schnoz is sniffing, no amount of inappropriate gurgling noises will do you any good, so I ask Mark Ainsworth, a chef who teaches continuing education classes on the physiology of taste for professionals at the Culinary Institute of America, how to develop a mental flavor bank.
Ainsworth’s approach is to train chefs on basic ingredients and key flavor foundations by making the poor things taste them. So his students spend a day sampling a pile of herbs, both fresh and dried; they go through the spices, the oils and the vinegars; they try onions browned, caramelized, sweated and sautéed, and nuts toasted versus roasted. They also taste these components in basic culinary combinations and cooking methods: the classic French flavor base of sautéd celery, carrots and onions called mirepoix, the rich blend of coconut milk, fresh herbs and chiles that start so many Thai dishes.
“Another way to get better at it,” Ainsworth says of tasting, “is to understand those ingredients that are common to a specific country, to its flavor profile … If you were to eat your food with your eyes closed,” he asks, “do you know where you are?”
Comparing Korean and Thai and Cantonese or Ukrainian and Polish and Bukharian is tricky for most folks — though it could be the start of a killer potluck supper club — but mastering the basic ingredients is easy: Buy 10 fresh herbs or five oils or cheeses or spices and taste them side by side, Ainsworth says.
And get in the habit of tasting all the ingredients that go into a dish you’re cooking before it’s made, he says, so you can see what they’re like raw and cooked in certain ways and with certain components. Although cooking techniques require practice, we have a remarkable memory for flavors once we’re told what they are, Ainsworth notes, meaning you have to taste pure marjoram only once to get it.
His colleague, associate professor Lani Raider — she teaches a class for culinary students called “Introduction to Gastronomy” — offers yet another suggestion for nailing down a flavor: Taste ingredients as fresh as you can get ‘em, straight from soil if possible.
“I take them out to the farm,” she says of her students, “and I pull the beet out of the ground.”
“What most people get in this country are hues of things,” Raider says, referring to the fact that unless you’re reading this in California, your supermarket asparagus probably sat for at least a week before you tasted it.
Get a Grip on Your Adjectives
Raider also offers another suggestion, one she lumps under the broader category of “expanding your consciousness.” Keep a food diary not of what you eat but what you experience. She says, “There’s a pretty big difference between eating and tasting.”
What she means is considering and taking note of the entire experience of tasting: The way the food feels in your mouth, what your beer smells like cold and if it’s different when it’s lukewarm, what you notice with the first piping-hot bite of sauce compared with the last chilled streaks you scrape up before the server takes the plate. Do you feel one sensation more than others as you chew, a citrusy tingle at first, followed by rush of sweet?
That’s a concept I hear again from Andrew Bell, a co-founder and the president of the American Sommelier Association, who trains wine snobs to be. “I tell my classes, ‘Your drinking days are over,’” he says. “Drinking does not require cognition; taste requires cognition.”
Wine tasting, you might have noticed, is big on cognition of a certain kind: a vocabulary of comparison, all that jazz about wine tasting like oak and petroleum and passion fruit and cat pee. Having “the balls,” as Bell puts it, to put what you’re tasting into new adjectives is what makes great tasters, great tasters.
But the rest of us usually just learn the old adjectives that turn into jargon, usually by tasting something that is already agreed-upon to be apple-y or citrusy or whatever — Merlot and plums, Riesling and petroleum — rather than trying to pick it out ourselves.
Bell’s tasting diary is different from Raider’s in one key respect, since with wine the goal is really the get — meaning, when you finally make the connection between what you’re tasting and what you’re supposed to be tasting. Getting to know wine — or other specific foodstuffs with their own jargon, like cheese or beer — often requires that you take a nip either in front of an expert or an open book.
Bell, like any other expert, will tell you that you haven’t failed if you haven’t sussed out a certain fruit in the aroma or flavor at the tail end of your guzzle — Hey! it’s all about enjoying the wine, right? — but it’s pretty damn satisfying when you nail them. (And if you can’t get any of them at all, well, maybe developing a wine cave shouldn’t your primary investment strategy.)
Then there are defects: Calling them out by name is important to fine tasters of wine, too. An admission: For years I’ve been hoping to be out to dinner with somebody who angrily declares the bottle of Beaujolais or whatever we’re drinking to be corked — so I can finally know what “corked” tastes like.
If I’d studied flavor chemistry at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, it turns out, I’d already know. Budding flavor experts there, says Gary Reineccius, the head of the department of food science and chemistry, take a class on common defects. “We spend three days making the worst foods you’ve ever tasted,” he says.
That way, the class can see what rancid olive oil (leave a near-empty bottle in the back of a warm cabinet for six months and try it next to a new one) or oxidized milk (put a bottle in the sun for a few hours) really tastes like in a recipe. Just by tasting, Reineccius says, he students can save a company with a returned product the $20,000 that two months of lab testing will cost it.
Though Reineccius, like Bell, is especially impressed by those bold enough to create their own tasting terms. He recalls a flavor production company he used to work for in New York City, where he and other chemists would gather to sniff new flavors each morning. “What these guys do is just be extremely conscious, not only of what they’re eating, but the world around them,” Reineccius says, “and that’s where they get a vocabulary.”
One of his all-time favorites, in fact, is a descriptor you probably won’t get to use at your next four-star dinner function: “That smells,” Reineccius recalls a colleague remarking, “just like the fire hydrant at 42nd Street.”
JJ Virgin has one of the stranger jobs out there: After spending 25 years studying health and fitness, she now spends her time on TLC, turning around the lives of food addicts on “Freaky Eaters.” (No, that’s not the show about people who eat laundry soap, a similar program on the same network called “My Super Strange Addiction.”) “Freaky Eaters” documents the life of a person addicted to a certain type of edible food — french fries, meat, and corn syrup have all been on the menu — as well as their recovery with the help of two specialists, Virgin and Dr. Mike Dow.
We spoke to JJ Virgin over the phone about what qualifies someone to be a “freaky eater,” as well as some of the more extreme measures they’ve taken on the program to make people confront their dangerous life choices.
This is the second season of the show, and there has been a lot of controversy about programs similar to “Freaky Eaters,” like “Hoarders” and “Intervention.” Some people are wondering if putting these people up on screen is helpful or just exploitative. What is your response to that sort of claim?
On “Freaky Eaters” we are dealing with people who don’t really fall into one specific disorder, one kind of psychological classification that can be treated. These are people that fall through the cracks, and they are desperate. They need help. I watch some of these shows out there that I do think are exploitative — though I do think most of them are more life-changing than exploitative — and I have to tell you, that’s not what we do. We do shock therapy, so you have people see the extent that they need to make the change, but I think everything is done in a very respectful way.
When you are dealing with someone who drinks gallons of tartar sauce and make them wade around in a pool of it, or have a guy who loves meat spend a day turning a pile of it into ground chuck in a freezer basement, would you call that behavioral therapy? Is that something you’d see psychological professionals doing if people weren’t falling through the cracks?
You know, behavioral therapy is really more what we do at the end of the show, what I call the “lateral shift”: having people make small changes in their lives. When someone is an addict of any type, the classic thing is to deny the problem or the extent of it. Shock therapy is to show these people their problem in a way that makes it impossible to deny or to downplay it.
What were some of the more outrageous examples you’ve had on the show?
The meat episode, that was so disgusting. We were hysterically laughing because the meat was spewing everywhere, as it was being ground up. The first season, we had a girl who ate 6,200 calories of sugar every day. She did all her shopping at the dollar store; it was amazing she wasn’t morbidly obese. So we had her lie down in a coffin and covered her with all the sugar she ate, and had her son read off a eulogy about all the things she was going to miss if she died from her lifestyle.
That’s intense.
We also had a pizza guy, where we had him pour all the fat from all the pizzas he ate in a year into a big bucket. And then we had him pour the bucket into jars. And at the end we had him dump the bucket, but instead he threw it, and it landed right on the cameraman, who was then covered in fat goop. And then we had a guy who ate 3-6 burgers a day, so we backed a truck filled with burgers right up to him and dumped out all the patties, just covered him up.
I can see how a lot of this is TV-friendly. Do you have a hard time differentiating yourself from the other TLC show, “My Strange Addiction,” where people eat stuff that is non-edible (like couch cushions, cigarette ash, and laundry detergent)?
People confuse us all the time. But what I think makes our show stand out is how relatable it is. I have people come up and ask me all the time, “This is what I do, am I freaky eater?” And I’m like “No, just because you eat a muffin everyday doesn’t get you qualified, sorry.”
Well that’s what’s so interesting, right? How blurry the lines can get? Because you’re not showing people with Pica, you’re showing people addicted to French fries. And I think a lot of people at home roll their eyes and go “Sure, we’re all addicted to French fries” until they see exactly how much this person is eating of it.
We did have a woman who had Pica and ate a lot of corn syrup, but that is still edible.
In my mind, the difference is severity … you can die from being obese, but it’s probably not going to kill you as fast as, say, downing laundry detergent every day.
Maybe not as fast, but you’ll find what we deal with is way more common, and therefore way more relatable. We try to get to the root of a lot of these issues on the show, because there is a psychological element to it, though a big part of being a “freaky eater” is biochemistry. Many of these people have a food sensitivity. They either are addicted to one taste, or they hate another kind. So the burger guy and the french fries person, they were both supertasters, they could taste things a mile away. And then this year we have a guy addicted to maple syrup, and he’s a “sweet taster”: nothing is sweet enough for him. These people can’t taste sweet well, so they keep wanting things sweeter and sweeter.
That’s interesting: so our predetermined sensitivity to different tastes can determine how hooked we get on a food?
Oh totally…we’re only at the beginning of understanding the biochemistry behind “taste.” It turns out you can taste things all down your G.I. tract. What we’re seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the extreme forms of people with a tasting sensitivity.
“Freaky Eaters” can be found on TLC at 10:00 and 10:30 EST every Sunday night.
Gwyneth Paltrow, stop it. I am begging you. You are making me look bad in front of all of my friends. Here I go, trying to defend your bourgeois reputation with a (fairly) nice review of your cookbook, calling many of the dishes unpretentious and easy to make.
You must have hated that. I almost can see you, queen-like, reading Salon (as you do every day) in the print form we give to celebrities, reading that article with your lovely eyes widening before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it across the steam room where you are currently enjoying a reflexology massage.
“Get me the New Yorker!” I hear you screaming at your personal assistant/GOOP editor (?)/Chris Martin, “I will teach them who is the most grandiloquent food celebrity of modern culture!”
And congratulations, Gwyneth. You did it. Lizzie Widdicombe’s article “Gwyneth’s World: Gwyneth Paltrow, Movie Star and Domestic Goddess“so turgidly describes your latest dinner party with Jay-Z, Michael Stipe, the Seinfelds, Christy Turlington and a bunch of other famous people that I wanted to crumple up my edition of the magazine and throw it across a steam room. But I can’t. Because I don’t have a steam room, and also I don’t have a copy of the New Yorker. Some of us aren’t made of crisp, lemon-scented money, Gwyneth!
Anyway, if I had to pick the five most offensive parts of this article (which is difficult because it is short, and also if I say “all of it” then I’m stuck with four blank spaces), it would have to start with the duck sentence.
1. (Seriously, with no context whatsoever):
Michael Stipe added, “Once, a duck she was cooking caught fire, and she threw it in the pool.”
“She eats like a truck driver,” (Mario Batali) said of Paltrow. He recalled being in Valencia, Spain, and “watching her eat an entire pan of paella as big as a manhole cover.”
3. Christy Turlington knows what will happen if she speaks ill against the Paltrow/Martin family:
“They do everything themselves, including the killing of the lobster,” she said. “It’s not the boiling-in-the-pot-and-screaming lobster thing. It’s a different, faster approach. I could never do it.”
“You smack it against a tree or something?” Batali asked.
“You stick a knife through the head,” said Turlington, who seemed suddenly troubled.
4. Why would anyone give quotes like this to the press?
Wendi Murdoch, sitting nearby, had said that she is a reader of Paltrow’s blog: “Only one thing comes to mind — healthy and organic.” She listed her favorite recipes: “Pumpkin soup, grilled market vegetables. It’s good. I get my chef to cook it.”
“But you’re directing the chef,” Kelly Behun, a friend of Murdoch’s, interjected.
5. And, of course, no party at Gwyneth Paltrow’s is complete without the slavish groveling:
Jessica Seinfeld made a toast … she turned to the assembled guests. “And you are all so lucky to be part of Gwyneth’s world. Because this is the real deal. And she’s invited all of you good people in here. I would never do that.”
White Knighting: (verb) Coming to the defense of an unpopular Internet celebrity, trend, or entity. As in “Dude, stop talking about how much you like ‘Friday.’ We all know you’re just white knighting Rebecca Black.
Gwyneth Paltrow is like the James Franco of bourgeois aestheticism. While James is busy being an artist/author/teacher/actor/etc., Mrs. Coldplay has branched out her career from actress to include singer, lifestyle mommy blogger and, most recently, health food authority. Despite having her cooking magazine concept turned down by Hearst, Gwyneth is undeterred: Her recent recipe book, “My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness,” has just hit the shelves after a truckload of buzz. And like Franco, Gwyneth is one of those people who is just easy to snark on: Her GOOP newsletter is designed for people just like herself — that is to say, moms who appreciate the tip that $60 olive oil is worth it and that a macrobiotic diet is totally key for your child’s health — making her an easy target for her clueless haute sensibilities. As Gabe Delahaye on Videogum wrote after Gwyneth came out with her “How to stuff a chicken” video:
First off, you’re going to want to start with one completely over-inflated sense of self-importance that allows for the belief that you should show people how to cook something for some reason even though you don’t need to do that at all and probably shouldn’t, thickly glazed with your practiced air of faux-populism as if you were not born to a famous actress and a highly successful producer, raised in Hollywood and private boarding schools, before yourself becoming a famous movie actress (or “actor,” as you would probably say), who then married a rock star and named her first child Apple.
This is a criticism I can relate to! Who is Gwyneth writing for, who are her tips helping? But after reading “My Father’s Daughter,” in which Gwyneth combines recipes with anecdotes about her father, Bruce Paltrow, impressing the importance of food and family on the actress before he passed away in 2002, I found myself … moved? Maybe not moved, exactly. After all, I almost threw the book away in disgust after reading this opening segment about what you MAY substitute spelt or sheep’s milk for if you don’t have time to go to your local fresh farmer’s market:
Oh, I can substitute cow’s milk for almond milk?! And pork bacon for tempeh and/or turkey bacon? Though these substitutions will come at the price of you explaining to me exactly why I shouldn’t do those things? Who wouldn’t want to read that piece of condescending cooking advice? Just from those first couple of pages, I was tempted to believe Eater.com‘s pre-review of the book, which warned that the prose altered between “lofty crypto-macrobiotic lecturing … and homey, Country Strong I’m-just-like-you talk (‘It’s a one-pan dish and easy cleanup!’).”
But once you get past your initial nausea of Gwyneth’s clueless haute couture sensibility, the recipes themselves are relatively simple and easy to make. Sure, there are the grilled “bake stuffed” lobsters and the duck “cassoulet” (her quotes, not mine), but there’s also a lemon pasta dish that has five ingredients, all of which I had at home. It’s almost as if Gwyneth wrote a helpful, totally easy to use cookbook that is as useful to college students as it is for hostesses in the Hamptons, but then she felt the need to GOOP it up with all this early, condescending text just to fill her quota of snobbishness. But skip the essays and go straight to the recipes, and you might be surprised how easy Gwyneth’s healthy medicine goes down.
Now that the artificial sweetener aspartame (Nutrasweet) has attracted suspicion, you might be thinking twice about that daily Diet Coke or Splenda (sucralose) in your coffee. Not that this is surprising; even without the stroke and cancer warnings, the word “artificial” alone conjures up images of shadowy figures in lab coats concocting solutions destined for your stomach. Much more reassuring are images of freshly plowed farms tucked in the mountains, like the one on the jar of Lundberg Family Farms’ organic brown rice syrup.
Brown rice syrup is just one of many “natural” sweeteners that have taken off in the wake of the backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose, which, of course, were invented to defeat the dietary axis of evil — refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Once confined to Berkeley communes, these not-refined-sugar, not-man-made substances pose a huge marketing opportunity, since most people who avoid sugar don’t want to get cancer but also aren’t ready to commit to a joyless, dessert-free existence. Natural sweeteners are the perfect answer to this conundrum. Right?
The biggest problem is that the term “natural” is a slippery one. Unlike with organic foods, there are no official standards in the U.S. to determine a natural versus unnatural food. Essentially, it’s a word that promises a lot — those wholesome fields — but can mean nothing.
The potency of that promise depends on the leap people make from “natural” to “healthy.” But because the popularity of alternative sweeteners is relatively new, there’s no definite consensus on their long-term risks and benefits. Plus, there’s no telling what unholy quantities Americans will consume of a sweetener with no yet-known health consequences whatsoever.
Then there’s the issue that sugar, in all its caloric and cholesterol-boosting splendor, is just so damn delicious. For one thing, sugar is more than just a sweetener; in baking, it’s a structuring agent that resists lumping and introduces air into batter as it creams, creating a fluffy and even texture. It also caramelizes when heated, developing a flavor much more complex than mere sweetness. How can you beat that? For people with diabetes or sugar allergies, natural non-sugar sweeteners can be a godsend. But those seeking a consequence-free sugar fix, beware: not all sweeteners are created equal. We took a standard sugar cookie recipe — flour, eggs, vanilla extract, butter — and subbed in a different sweetener for each batch to find out what works, what doesn’t, and what actually tastes good.
Agave syrup
The facts: Beloved by raw food enthusiasts, agave syrup has become one of the easiest alternative sweeteners to find in grocery stores. It’s derived from the Mexican succulent plant agave, of which there are several varieties. It has to be processed to become sweet, and depending on that process, it can be comparable in composition to the dreaded high fructose corn syrup. True, agave has a low glycemic index — meaning it releases glucose into the blood stream at a slower rate than refined sugar — so it can help keep blood sugar levels stable. Eating agave as a “healthy” alternative to sugar, however, is pointless; the two have the same number of calories, no nutritional value whatsoever, and, even though it doesn’t spike blood sugar, the primary sugar in agave, fructose, has been linked to cancer and cholesterol problems when consumed in large quantities.
The experience: Agave syrup is very similar to honey or maple syrup in terms of consistency, though it has a distinctly deeper, cleaner sweetness than either, without as assertive a flavor. Subbing agave for sugar is relatively simple; because it’s sweeter than sugar, a cup of sugar should be replaced by ¾ cup of agave syrup. Don’t expect an identical product, though — our crack team of Salon taste-testers noted that cookies made with agave syrup became “densely chewy” and “raisin-like” in taste, with a “nice complexity.”
Brown rice syrup
The facts: Brown rice syrup is what happens when cooked brown rice meets barley malt enzymes. The sweetness comes from starchy complex carbohydrates, which take a couple of hours to digest. As a result, the glucose is released gradually into the bloodstream, providing a steady supply of energy rather than the rush — and crash — of cane sugar. Plus, the syrup maintains some of the nutrients in brown rice, like protein, so it’s not a total nutritional bust like most sweeteners are.
The experience: Although nutritionally, brown rice syrup is the best you could hope for, it certainly doesn’t taste like table sugar. Maltose (the kind of sugar in brown rice syrup) is not as sweet as sucrose, so you’ll need about 1¼ cups of syrup to replace a cup of sugar. By itself, brown rice syrup is similar to butterscotch in taste and consistency. Baking it into cookies, though, resulted in an “unpleasantly gummy” texture, and made one tester feel “like I just woke up from a nightmare where I was stuck in a San Francisco commune in 1971, only to find out that it wasn’t a dream.” The mild butterscotch taste has potential, though, and could work well as a complementary flavor in bread or a savory dish.
Stevia
The facts: Stevia’s not technically a sugar; it’s extracted from a sweet herb of the same name. Therefore it has no calories and doesn’t raise blood sugar. Though the FDA labeled it a “dangerous food additive” in 1991 after an “anonymous industry complaint” (read: shadowy figures in lab coats), stevia is now back on the market as a “dietary supplement.” In the rest of the world, particularly Japan, widespread use of stevia has been going on for decades.
The experience: The biggest drawback of this seemingly perfect sweetener is that it has an “odd chemical aftertaste” that is not weakened in the baking process; one tester described the aftertaste of the cookie as “psychological torture.” It’s a pleasant, pure sweetness at first that just keeps on going … and going … and going, long after you are ready for the taste to end. If you can get used to that, you only need a teaspoon of the powder to replace a cup of sugar. Keep in mind, though, that sugar is more than just a flavoring; take away its structural properties from a recipe and you’re left with one crumbly cookie. To adjust, we added in more butter, resulting in a shortbread-like consistency.
Date sugar
The facts: Date sugar is so low-tech it’s kind of funny — it’s just dehydrated dates that have been ground into a powder. That means it’s completely unprocessed and retains all the nutrients in dates. It’s high in fiber and protein, and has lots of vitamins and minerals like iron and potassium. Plus, it qualifies as a raw food. It still contains sucrose, fructose and glucose, so it’s not a good alternative for diabetics or people looking to control their blood sugar.
The experience: Date sugar seems to be the Salon staff’s favorite sweetener of the bunch. It has a very subtle sweetness that evoked almonds for one tester. Another described it as “nutty, not super sweet.” The cookie’s texture turned out to be “very crumbly” and “chalky” but not unpleasant. Date sugar’s not soluble, so don’t try to put it in tea or coffee. It is, however, simultaneously delicious and nutritious, which is no small feat.
A few days ago, I put up a little post on the pleasures of vegetables, the opportunities for creativity they allow, and asked for your favorite unusual ways to use them. (Your favorite ways that involve eating, I meant.) And in between discussions of whether the French have ruined the world for vegetarianism and a comment that suggested that all the bright promise of my culinary school education is being wasted (thanks! I guess?), you came through with scads of interesting ideas. Here are some of our favorites.
1) Tomato tip: Use the stems for flavour too. Don’t eat them but allow stems to infuse your sauces/stocks/tomato waters, etc. That’s where the lovely tomato smell derives from.
- MissTan
I remember once fondling a friend’s tomato plant and being horrified by my hands afterward. They had taken on so much of the incredibly intense smell from the stems that I wanted to gag, and so I’ve been wary of touching the stems ever since. But I love this idea — diluted in a sauce or stock, that concentrated aroma can relax and scent the whole lot. In fact, British culinary superstar (that is not an oxymoron) Heston Blumenthal recommends you plop a tomato stem or two in pots of sauce or ketchup and let them sit there for a few hours. (Make sure to do it when the sauce is cool, though; the aromatic compounds tend to disappear when heated.)
And speaking of flavoring:
2) Ditto celery leaves (I also use those in soup). My secret stock ingredient has always been a handful of cheap dried mushrooms you can get in bulk at the Asian grocery stores.
- MizMorton
I used to feel about celery leaves (literally, the leaves on the end of stalks of celery) the way I felt about my hands after rubbing them all up and down that tomato plant: straight grody. But used judiciously as an herb garnish, or in a well-dressed salad, the intense celery flavor becomes heady and refreshing. And those dried shiitake mushrooms, of course, are just loaded with depth of flavor; they give meatiness to anything they touch.
3) I’m studying South Asian spices — to me that’s the way to be vegetarian.
4) Cannellini beans and mustard greens, sautéed with garlic and dried sage, is one of my all-time favorite meals, I am not ashamed to say.
-WeCanBeHeroes
OK, so that’s a lovely and near-classic combination. But really I had to include this comment because the name of the commenter got me to break out the Bowie on my headphones.
5) Blackeyed peas are about so much more than New Year’s Hoppin’ John. You can put them in a pot with just about anything and make an awesome flavorful stew.
- Dartvader
Word! I’m always amazed by the rich flavor and creamy body well-cooked beans can bring when cooked in salted water. I never throw out the liquid I cook my beans in; it’s a broth as delicious as any. (And ignore the old saw about not salting the water you cook your beans in. Just know that it’ll probably reduce, so don’t salt it too much at the start.)
6) What about asparagus just plucked from the bed, briefly blanched, and eaten in place of a toast soldier with an egg boiled so the white is just set and the yolk is still runny? Vegetables can turn the divine into the miraculous.
-Wick47
Why, yes! Meanwhile, from the green leafy vegetable camp:
7) The advice I had always heard was that kale needed long cooking times because it’s so tough. But you know what? I hate mushy, long-cooked vegetables. So I did short braises for a while, which worked OK. Then I looked at Whole Food’s kale salad and figured out the trick: cut the kale leaves into teeny, tiny bits — essentially, using a knife to do the job of your teeth.
-Raisin
Boom! Dress that baby with some good olive oil, some lemon or vinegar, salt, pepper and plenty of good shaved cheese, and you’ll be happy to give your chewing muscles a little workout.
When in doubt, ROAST. Almost any veggie will be elevated to the next level if you toss it in some good olive oil and good salt and pepper and give it a good roast.
-Starmonkey4304
I’m totally with Starmonkey on this one, but since I was already in a Bowie mood, I also had to include this because his/her name also got me to break out another classic:
(And you have to love the dorks in back onstage going, “OMG who are these weirdos?!”) Ahem. Right, roasting. Here are a couple of ideas too:
9) Roast some parsnips with olive oil and salt until golden brown. Put them in a bowl with chopped parsley, some minced orange zest, a few chopped dried apricots, and some leftover wild rice. Squeeze a couple of clementines or the juice of an orange over everything. Toss. This is great warm, out of the oven or cold from the fridge.
-DeaH
And back to MizMorton:
10) At Christmas I made a “winter crudite” platter. I roasted carrots, parsnips, beets, cauliflower and these tiny potatoes I found at Trader Joe’s. I roasted them according to Francis’ article, actually. Served them at room temp with a killer dip — puréed cannellini beans with lots of olive oil and garlic.
-MizMorton
See, people? Fun! And if you have more tips, please share them in the comments below.
View a slide show 
JJ Virgin and Dr. Mike Dow on "Freaky Eaters." 
"Let them eat soy cakes!" 
Gwyneth's cookbook: surprisingly non-GOOPy. 
The facts: Beloved by raw food enthusiasts, agave syrup has become one of the easiest alternative sweeteners to find in grocery stores. It’s derived from the Mexican succulent plant agave, of which there are several varieties. It has to be processed to become sweet, and depending on that process, it can be comparable in composition to the dreaded high fructose corn syrup. True, agave has a low glycemic index — meaning it releases glucose into the blood stream at a slower rate than refined sugar — so it can help keep blood sugar levels stable. Eating agave as a “healthy” alternative to sugar, however, is pointless; the two have the same number of calories, no nutritional value whatsoever, and, even though it doesn’t spike blood sugar, the primary sugar in agave, fructose, has been linked to cancer and cholesterol problems when consumed in large quantities.
The facts: Brown rice syrup is what happens when cooked brown rice meets barley malt enzymes. The sweetness comes from starchy complex carbohydrates, which take a couple of hours to digest. As a result, the glucose is released gradually into the bloodstream, providing a steady supply of energy rather than the rush — and crash — of cane sugar. Plus, the syrup maintains some of the nutrients in brown rice, like protein, so it’s not a total nutritional bust like most sweeteners are.
The facts: Stevia’s not technically a sugar; it’s extracted from a sweet herb of the same name. Therefore it has no calories and doesn’t raise blood sugar. Though the FDA labeled it a “dangerous food additive” in 1991 after an “anonymous industry complaint” (read: shadowy figures in lab coats), stevia is now back on the market as a “dietary supplement.” In the rest of the world, particularly Japan, widespread use of stevia has been going on for decades.
The facts: Date sugar is so low-tech it’s kind of funny — it’s just dehydrated dates that have been ground into a powder. That means it’s completely unprocessed and retains all the nutrients in dates. It’s high in fiber and protein, and has lots of vitamins and minerals like iron and potassium. Plus, it qualifies as a raw food. It still contains sucrose, fructose and glucose, so it’s not a good alternative for diabetics or people looking to control their blood sugar.
When in doubt, 
