Yes, I know that I did not get my pet peeves in on time BUT..............Sunday was my birthday and the beginning of what is turning out to be a 5+ day heatwave. It is beastly hot here with absolutely horrid air quality. It is 3am and my kitchen is the coolest room at the moment so I thought I'd sit here and bang about the keyboard for a time.
MY CULINARY PET PEEVES...............
Number one has GOT to be carmel. There is another A in the word for that soft, splodgy, gooey wonderful stuff. It is caramel and my spell check immediately underlines carmel when not written with a capital C. Carmel is a place, carAmel is what we eat. Yes, it bugs me that much!
Running a close second is confectionate sugar. Ooh my eye is twitching ever so slightly at the moment. It can be confectioner's sugar, powdered sugar, icing sugar and I will even go so far as to accept what everyone called it when I was a child; 10x sugar but there is NO such item as confectionate sugar. See? There pops up the red underline yet again.
The number of people who have asked me, when I have been discussing Moroccan, Italian and Greek food...........how do you grate a tomato? How do you grate a tomato? You're seriously asking me this and you want to make ethnic food and/or have ever cooked in your life? The same way you'd grate an onion or carrot. Then I get, ''well I will just chop it." If I wanted you to chop it I would have said chop it. There is a reason for why things are done in this world.
"I added (fill in the blank of anything that does not belong in a dish and/or region's food) to spice it up. If it was supposed to have been spiced up, I would have again said so. People have such preconceived wrong ideas regarding ethnic food that they seem to think they know better than a dish that has been successfully feeding people for sometimes thousands of years. If you want authenticity you're in the right place. If you want internet and television pap that says you can add, subtract and substitute at will then I am dearly sorry but you are in the most wrong place that you could ever be.
At the very least I am real and honest.
