Chocolate is often added to chili in an attempt to add an extra… layer, or depth, … of flavor. Use dark (bittersweet) chocolate at the very end, and only use a small amount. 2 or 3 Hershey’s Kisses-sized pieces will do. Maybe less.
I’d be interested in tasting bison in a chili. That’s an awfully lean piece of meat.
My inlaws got me a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas last year. In three months, I went through 100lbs of flour.
I am the only person I know who bakes gingerbread, sponge cake, and Danish pastry for fun.
I am not safe in ethnic food stores. Well, in any food stores, really.
It’s good to meet another Nigel Slater devotee. My food author gods are Nigel Slater, John Thorne, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin, and Nigella Lawson. Do you have Kitchen Diaries? The courgette cheese crumble with walnuts is fantastic.
We’ve traveled in Europe a few times, and I love to visit outdoor food markets wherever we go. It’s agonizing to look at all the fabulous raw ingredients and not be able to cook them because we’re staying at a hotel! Mr. brown, although he likes markets and good cooking, doesn’t understand. “We’re on vacation!” he says. “You don’t want to be cooped up in a kitchen, chopping onions and washing dishes on vacation!”
We tried renting a vacation cottage in Burgundy, once, so I could cook, but we both promptly came down with mal de voyageur from drinking the tap water there, and that put an end to that. The place was overrun with house centipedes, anyway.
I also like visiting plain old supermarkets in France and Germany, and am always blown away by the high quality of their pre-packaged foods. Try to get duck terrine or country pork pate at one of our Safeways!
I return from European vacations with photos of farmers’ markets, bakeries, fromageries, vineyards, and gasthauses, and precious few of monuments or cathedrals.
I love all that, too, and would like to travel to Bologna just for the chow. But for the love of Julia Child, can we not use the moronic made-up word “foodie”? There are several suitable existing words to choose from. Personally, I’m a gourmand.
call it what you will, I like to cook, and I like to try a wide variety of foods. I’m a lazy gourmet; I don’t spend too many weekends where all I do is cook, but we eat quite well, and seldom repeat a menu. I’m no baker, but I’ll put my boneless leg of lamb with home made tatziki sauce up against anyone’s! I’m the guy who alway ends up tending the grill at parties, and actually enjoy it. I agree that there’s a certain satisfaction to having people enjoy a meal you’ve cooked. And I didn’t learn to really cook until perhaps 10 years ago. I think that one of the benchmarks of a restaurant for me nowadays is “could I make that at home, and could I do it better?” Sometimes the answer is yes, and that’s a nice feeling.
Oh, yep, I think of food as a full palette of paint, with differing layers of texture and flavors, and intricate chemistry in bringing it all together. I love the building and process of cooking, especially with different spices.
One item of note is, that while I don’t eat meat, I’ve retained an ability to know the ability to cook it with the same high pallette. I worked at a chic restaurant, and the owner/chef was amazed at that, considering I didn’t eat it. Isn’t that odd??? Well, it’s just knowing the flavor, and being able to understand what goes with what. Still, kinda like being later blind and painting.
The best taste symphony I ever had was at a small Indian restaurant in Memphis. In Indian cuisine, there’s some attention paid to various tastes, and to balance them. The meal was so perfectly spiced and balanced that by the end, it was ecstatic.
Second best, an Ethiopian restaurant in Chicago. Again, it was the spices that did it. It left me in a trance of joy. I’m gonna give a shout out here to some old cultures who have got it so right!
Sorry Samm, I must have missed this one! I found both of these recipies in Nigel Slater’s Appetite. If you can’t beg, borrow or steal a copy of this excellent cookbook, let me know here and I’ll see if I can post them on the boards. I’d have to make sure I wasn’t infringing any copyright though! 
They are both really quite easy to make and very satisfying once you bring a huge, aromatic steaming bowl of flavoursome goodiness to the table.
Foodie? Guilty! I don’t spend as much time as I should in the kitchen, but now that my new kitchen units have been installed, I can get most of the important stuff out of storage and back into use.
I started cooking when I was a teen. My family were so busy running around playing sport and stuff on the weekends that we never all sat down together for meals, so it was vital to learn to cook serviceable meals. My mother was also a very good cook who had learned to cook Indian food from Indians and Italian food from Italians. We used to eat a far more cosmopolitan diet than was common among my friends. In those days you didn’t go to a supermarket and find varieties of ready packaged “ethnic” food but I used to get it at home and learned what I could.
I love to read good cook books and often find them as absorbing as a mystery novel. I can sit and contemplate a good recipe and love working out how they come together. However I don’t often follow recipes when I am cooking. I like to start with an idea or impression of what I am going to do and play it by ear.
When I visit friends or family I like to take the opportunity to cook for people that are providing me with accomodation. My brother’s place in particular is fun. Some of the family are vegetarians and others aren’t. It is nice to relieve my SIL of the annoyance of catering for everyone because to me it is a challenge and good fun.
Recently I discovered a butcher who makes really nice lean gourmet sausages. I bought 3 different varieties: Italian pork, garlic and chili; Chicken with chili and pineapple; and Lamb tandoori with yoghurt. When I went back to buy some more he asked how I had liked the first 3 varieties. I told him how I had served them:
with a baked fennel risotto and grilled mushrooms; with mashed butternut pumpkin and sweet and sour vegetables; and in wraps with a spinach salad and some saffron rice. He asked me to write up the recipes for his customers and as soon as I do so I reckon I have made is as a foodie.
Glad to hear another person loves Nigel Slater. He really is the most inspirational food writer, isn’t he? I love the things in Appetite.
As for me: yeah, I’m a foodie. Food is my hobby. I love it. Cooking it, and eating it. If it weren’t so badly paid, I would retrain as a chef. I would also have to increase my skill levels and techniques a lot.
Be jealous: last year I ate at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, and Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s. This year I’m eating at The Fat Duck.
At the end of last summer, I made spaghetti sauce in a **wok **on my charcoal grill. I made a “volcano” out of the coals, and put the wok in it. It was one of my highlights from all of last year, and I don’t just mean cooking-wise.
“there is just hubby and me” does not lead logically to “I don’t like to cook.”
I’m not trying to single you out, but I’m just saying: people who don’t cook, just don’t cook.
If it’s just “hubby and me”, that’s their excuse. If they have kids, they’re too busy to cook. You either consider preparing your own food a priority, or you don’t.
There’s just wife and me at home, and we cook pretty much every single night. We spend time together in the kitchen, drinking wine, preparing food, canoodling, and we’ve done it that way for years.
Yes, I, too, love food. I like planning my meals. I like shopping for food. I like cooking. I like reading about food. I like dining out. I like inventing new things.
Last night, we had fajitas with chicken and onions in achiote paste with home-made guac.
While the chicken was cooking, I seared a pork tenderloin, and tonight, I will finish “twice cooked pork tenderloin” with a apple pan sauce-- a recipe I just saw on NYTimes video on their web site. I’ve never had it before, and that’s got me excited all day.
After work, I’m riding my bike, and then I pop in a CD, and it’s into the kitchen for cooking (and canoodling) for an hour.
I started cooking out of boredom back in about 1970. I was working nights, my then-wife was working days. Found out I was pretty good at it, after a few false starts. My life has been fairly nomadic, living in places where the only food entertainment was in my own kitchen, so I’ve learned to do it well and how to improvise. Alaska is not the armpit of the cuisine world, but it’s no San Francisco. Or even San Luis Obispo, for that matter. We take regular breaks to Seattle or Portland or SFO. Even NYC one Christmas. I lived in Europe for seven years, which was heaven, foodwise. Even Portugal had its good food points, although they were few. Out of desperation, we actually took a two week food vacation to Italy when we lived there.
Simple and well-prepared does it for me. A risotto made perfectly or even something as simple as a perfectly browned grilled cheese sandwich gives me great pleasure.
Partly because of this thread, I took a look in my pantry and freezer and was appalled. I am not grocery shopping until I’ve worked through half of the stuff I’ve got.
[SUB]But I love grocery shopping![/SUB]
Lissa, there’s only two of us, and I love to cook. I just find lots of friends and co-workers to feed when I’m on a baking binge (scheduled for tomorrow. Whole wheat, semolina, raisin, ciabatta, ham and black pepper).
No worries, I am off to Amazon to buy this book right now! Thanks!
Checking in.
After my parents got divorced, my mother required both my brother and me to cook dinner one night a week, so I’ve been comfortable in the kitchen for quite a while. I got out of the habit during and after college but later resumed the hobby in earnest.
This weekend, I’m making a four-course feast for friends. The main entree is a lamb chop with a black-pepper-and-honey glaze.
And for those who are recommending authors, if you haven’t read Harold McGee, you haven’t read anyone. 
Pthibbit. I’ve read Harold McGee. I like him, but I’m more interested in the aethetics of food than its chemistry. I continue to worship Nigel Slater and John Thorne. And Elizabeth David, etc.
Does anyone else have Kitchen Diaries?
Allow me to respectfully disagree. I have amassed quite a belly without being able to cook very well. All it takes is the right combination of take-out, drive-throughs, restaurants and pizza delivery.
Having said that, I obviously need to scout for and kidnap one of these gourmet foodies. I’d much prefer homemade short ribs with tagliatelle over a BK Big Fish, but truthfully I just can’t be arsed.
I am still quite an amateur, but I am learning to cook “by feel” as I put it. I read a few recipes to get the idea of how to make something new, say, a stew. Then I go by trial and error, nothing comes out exactly the same twice. This has gotten me from making toast and spaghetti when I first got married to now, when I feel pretty comfortable that I can get a decent meal together with a few basic ingredients on my own. I am getting pretty good at my own version of basics like pasta sauce and chili, and stews and more kinds of meats. I know I am not an expert in anything, but considering I grew up with a diet of casseroles and more casseroles, I think I am doing pretty well, the rest of my family thinks we eat very adventurously when I think they are just mostly bland.
I like to read cookbooks but I don’t have much patience for dozens of ingredients. I like simple basic flavors and am learning what goes together. For a while I made the early cook’s mistakes of over seasoning everything (more must be better, right?) but I think I am settling down now. I really like kitchen gadgets and can spend a lot of time in a kitchen store just wandering around. My son seems to be developing a good taste for food and it is fun to see him enjoy flavors for the first time (he is 2, and I am glad he is not a picky eater. He has likes and dislikes but is quite adventurous.)
I find that when I have a good, flavorful dish, I can actually eat less and be satisfied. It’s the bland carbs that make me overeat because they don’t satisfy. A small, well flavored dish is much more satisfying than the biggest salty fast food meal. My favorite restaurant is a Spanish Tapas Bistro, because I can get a few well-made small dishes and enjoy a wide variety of flavors without feeling stuffed. I also love wine but I admit I don’t know much about it other than “this is good, this isn’t.”
Maybe 20 years from now I will consider myself a foodie, now I am just trying!
I’m not a foodie yet, but I didn’t become overweight during puberty and throughout adulthood by not liking food. I like trying new foods, and am often eager to experience new types of cuisine. I enjoy cooking, am eager to learn more, and I realize that the impending wedding registry is going to end up having me register for all the foodie gadgets that I’ve been dreaming about but haven’t had the time or resources to acquire.
Because of this thread, I went out and finally bought Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food: version 2.0, which I’ve been eyeing for a while. (I need more help on basics and mechanics and I like his style. We’ll see if his recipes are up to snuff in my eager hands.)
Not personally, but I managed to get my sister a *signed * copy for her birthday! 