View Single Post
  #51   ^
Old Sun, Aug-25-24, 10:46
Calianna's Avatar
Calianna Calianna is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 2,177
 
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000 Female 63
BF:
Progress: 50%
Default

WB, you definitely have a different/special situation with your severe oxalate sensitivities - but you still manage to get a variety of plants in your diet, even if in small amounts.

Quote:
It's just everything is over-seasoned these days. When spices were like gold dust out of their native area, I can't see traditional cuisine relying so heavily on this much spice.


I do tend to be pretty heavy-handed with the spices and herbs - I grew up with food that had so little seasoning that most of my mother's tiny herb and spice containers in the cabinet were at least 30 years old, because she used them so infrequently and in such tiny amounts on the few foods she seasoned with them.

Once I was out on my own, I went to the opposite end of the seasoning spectrum, because I loved to actually be able to TASTE the seasonings, lots of them! I threw practically everything from my spice rack in some foods, LOL! I ended up with a lot of different foods tasting pretty much the same, simply because of the vast number of seasonings and the amount I was using. (if you use ridiculous amounts of enough different green herbs in a red spaghetti sauce it starts to look more like a murky brown... and tastes like you threw the entire spice rack at it.)

I've cut back on the overwhelming seasoning in recent decades, mostly because I subscribed to a menu service about 20 years ago (I don't think it's available any more) with recipes that called for reasonable amounts of specific seasonings for each recipe. It was almost shocking to me how different world cuisines had different seasoning profiles, and even different seasoning profiles within those cuisines, so that even recipes that shares some seasonings all tasted different because the amount of common seasonings was different, and additional seasonings were different. The recipes call for far more seasonings and in larger amounts than my mother would have ever considered using, but they're still far more limited in just how much and how many different seasonings in each recipe compared to what I had been used to using. I still use a lot of those recipes.

Quote:
We have two local stores that are health food oriented, and stock a lot of vegetarian/vegan products. People buy "plant-based" because they've been convinced it's healthy.

They don't do it for the food. It's all the same food, with all the same added ingredients.
I think that's why the vegan search for satisfying food creates an image of demand, but it just won't scale up. People won't eat it!


It's really pretty pathetic that they're using the same base ingredients in pretty much everything - soy beans, pea protein, wheat, seed oils, maybe some chick peas. Add in the occasional beets to make a vegan meat substitute "bleed" like real meat.

With my excessive seasoning assortment, I started out with different base ingredients, then added all the same seasonings so that a beef stew had the same seasoning profile as the spaghetti sauce, etc.

Vegans are starting out with the same base ingredients, then making it into different shapes or adding a few seasonings to make it seem like a different food.

As misguided as my over-seasoning everything was, at least the nutritional value was more well rounded, so I wasn't constantly looking for something different to satisfy the body's craving for a more well rounded nutritional profile.
Reply With Quote