My mother’s notions include mistakenly believing that “you should have a complete diet” means “you should eat anything that anybody anywhere has deemed edible, even if you hate it.”
Now, I don’t know what are acelgas called in English, but it’s a veggie that nobody in my family likes. While we haven’t spent hours glossing the reasons why, I can tell you we all hate it; in my case, I find the texture too bland and the taste too strong.
Mom insists in eating it, though - although she gags on it. One day she’d added to the boiled acelgas a bechamel sauce with bits of bacon and the contents of a can of berberechos (a kind of shellfish that’s often used in tapas, you just open the can, dump it out, squeeze half a lemon on top of it and sprinkle some cayenne pepper). My brother looked at it and said “Mom, forcing anybody to eat acelgas is sadism, forcing yourself masochism - and doing that to a perfectly good can of berberechos is heresy!”
The two of us made ourselves chorizo omelettes instead.
Oh, and the detail that kills me? She’ll claim that veggies are good because you know, they’re not fattening. Maybe not by themselves… but with bechamel and bacon? :smack:
Ooh. Looks like swiss chard aka silverbeet, which was also, for reasons I’m not clear on, known as ‘spinach’ where I grew up. It’s an insult to real spinach, which I discovered I quite like, once I moved somewhere with a sane vegetable nomenclature system.
I once saw a recipe for sangria which indicated “red wine (optional)”.
Dude, I’m about one letter away from being a teetotaler and when I make sangría or kalimotxo cha bet they include the cheapest wine-in-a-box I’ve been able to find! What’s this “optional” you speak of?
Mind you, the same recipe included grenadine and that one was not labeled optional. borrows the barfie from the previous post
I have seen this listed in several cookbooks that I inherited from my mom and I can remember her finding these receipies and saying, “Well hell, why don’t you just throw some hot dogs and Velveeta in there while you’re at it and ruin it completely?”
I agree the ketchup sounds horrible in lasagna… but I’ve had many a lasagna with cottage cheese. It’s not really that bad, in fact I kind of like it compared to ricotta. Ricotta is just so, so… dense. Hell, I don’t think you could even get ricotta around here until the mid eighties and that was only if you lived in a city or went to a specialty food store.
The whole thing is, that cottage cheese essentially is ricotta. Just larger curds and not well drained. In fact, a lot of older lasagna recipes called for drained cottage cheese or dry curd cottage cheese. The Eastern Europeans around here also liked to hang it in cheesecloth for a few days and make Easter Cheese with it.
Speaking of ketchup, we have a “Mexican” restaurant in town here that uses it as enchilada sauce. I kid you not. The first time I ordered the enchiladas, when the waiter plopped the plate down in front of me I noticed a very familiar smell. Upon investigation, there it was: ketchup. On my enchiladas. In a restaurant.
Actually, that recipe doesn’t sound too bad, but only if you were to add a dab of the chard and bacon bechemel to a cockle (berberecho) on the halfshell and top with a sprinkling of parmesan and some breadrumbs and then broil it. It sounds like a great Spanish version of Clams Casino or perhaps Oysters Rockefellar
Babelfish says they’re beets, which I don’t like but actually sounds appetizing with bacon and lemon on it. But I wouldn’t force myself to eat it in the name of a balanced diet.
My entry is flavoringed curly fries. Give me the classic, crispy and super duper hot and thin ketchup mobile in a hole in the wall shack made from a mobile home in upstate NY. Adding seasoning to it defeated the main purposes, which is the oilycrisp clean flavor and its use as a ketchup delivery method.
These are making me shudder. I am a post-op gastric bypass patient and aside from (A) being vigilant about sugar/high fructose corn syrup and (B) limiting processed carbs, I would rather go without than to make some really egregious substitutions. And you’re right about fat free half & half - loaded with crap and it tastes nasty to boot.
Huh? That’s more like some kind of vomitous sandwich. There’s nothing even remotely Mexican or even Tex-Mex about that.
Real tacos have corn tortillas. End of story.
As for the OP… my grandmother was severely Type II diabetic (to the point where she had to take shots), and my mother & aunt made a variety of rather strange diabetic-friendly cakes and stuff for her on holidays.
The Apple cake wasn’t bad, but the sugar-free German chocolate cake seemed more like chocolate infused sawdust to me.
But not with the silverbeet (or whatever they really are)! I like tigres as much as the next shellfish eater but… acelgas. Yuck.
Tigres (“tigers”, orange, black and fierce) are another popular tapa:
mussels are emptied and cleaned; the chopped-up musselmeat is mixed with a hot, thick bechamel (hot as in “feel free with the red pepper and chopped-up dry red peppers”, not as in temperature); this is then put on the mussel half-shells, breaded lightly and fried.
Acelgas are green and leafy; very dark green, with the central “trunk” and veins white. Will go-ogle pics…
I don’t get all the hate for cottage cheese in lasagne. I’ve had it both ways and I like them both but prefer cottage cheese.
I don’t just use mozzarella for the top/layers though. I use several types of cheese (okay, I buy the Italian shredded mix at the store) and I find that makes a huge difference in flavour.