I've got a foodblog. I don't take very good pictures of my food, but I don't care that much - I'm more interested in eating it than in spending a bunch of time setting up the photo. And I'll be sharing the posts here and maybe talking about stuff. With that out of the way:
Let's talk about the Parsley Walnut Pesto I made recently. See, it's LIKE regular pesto, except it's cheaper, because parsley is cheaper than basil and walnuts are cheaper than pinenuts. It doesn't taste exactly the same, but it's still good. But that brings up something. The internet is crawling with fancy-pants foodblogs that throw truffle oil and saffron around like it ain't no thing, or expect you to have half a dozen different types of flour in your cupboard at any one time, just in case a recipe wants half a cup of something. The variety of kitchen gizmos you'll be called upon to use in a given recipe is stunning. It's a pretty pricey world these people live in, is what I'm saying. And then on the other end of the spectrum you have people proudly waving the boxed-mix and condensed-cream-of-whatever-soup flag. It's tough to locate yourself in a part of this spectrum you can be proud of, or at least it is for me.
See, I have a pretty strong need to keep stuff on the budget side, not just because I'm not made of money, but also because it just doesn't sit right with me to buy a fancy brand of something when the store brand is just as good (or good enough). And I just can't bring myself to splash out on luxury ingredients, unless I already know that I really, really love them. At the same time, though, I want to make things "right" - I don't want to make a bastardized version of something, particularly when I'm making something from a culture other than my own. I don't want my friends from those cultures to be appalled by the liberties I took or the corners I cut with their favourite childhood food. I sort of feel like the point of having a foodblog and capital-C cooking involves making things from scratch, too, but I fall off THAT particular wagon all the time, especially involving jarred pasta sauce... I know, I know, I know. And this conviction in itself is a form of snobbery, since not everyone can afford to care about that stuff, and really who am I to gauge my own success at it anyway?
So what do you do? If you want to be legitimate and make food that's good and real and lives up to some (possibly arbitrary) standard, but you don't want to be, you know, a jerk about it, what do you do? I try to balance those 2 ends of the see-saw, but I'm not sure I always succeed.
In this recipe, I made a kind of pesto I've never really made before - well, I substituted walnuts for pinenuts once, just because I couldn't find any pinenuts that day, but I've never done the parsley thing - and it worked out well and tasted good and the whole thing. And it was also, happy side effect, cheaper. And I think with things like pesto you've got a lot of liberty to substitute other things and still get to call it pesto. So this time I'm pretty happy with the changes I made, and I don't think anyone should be embarrassed to make this. But it doesn't mean that my up-with-peasant-food ass is going to skip buying pinenuts to make regular pesto next time.
Well put! I fully agree with you. Professionally, I take more pride in coaxing interesting flavors out of cheap ingredients than I do using expensive ingredients. I would much prefer to braise a cheap cut of meat than to grill some $20/lb beef tenderloin. I feel the same way about how I eat too, and how I cook at home.
ReplyDeleteThat said, basil isn't cheap in the supermarket, but it's abundant in the summer time at farmers markets, and cheap! I was paying 75c a bunch over the summer for amazingly fragrant basil from a friend who cut and delivered on same day. I had basil all over my menu that summer!