Tropicalsenior

I had to read that twice. You kind of threw me there. I thought that would be the final outrage, coffee in carbonara. Yes, I'm sitting here right now with a big cup of Costa Rican coffee in front of me. I still laugh about the time that we had visitors from Seattle and they brought me several bags of Starbucks. I didn't have the heart to tell them that Starbucks buys coffee from Costa Rica. I just kept it and gave it to my Costa Rican friends for Christmas.

How inconsiderate of her!

My husband absolutely hated beef stroganoff so for years I fed him beef and sour cream gravy with mushrooms. He loved it.

I know we're just getting into a matter of semantics but that's still implies that it is carbonara, which it is not. By saying that something is inspired by another dish, it means that you have taken the basic premise of the original and added your own touch to make your own dish. With all the billions of recipes on the internet it must be hard to come up with names that are original and that people will be drawn to. The other day I saw a recipe for Yummy Nummy Beef Stroganoff. You won't catch me clicking on that one!

Just one word will do it. Inspired. Carbonara inspired.

i feel like you're deliberately misunderstanding me in order to maintain your outrage. I'm not outraged I'm just a little sad. There are a few Classics it I do feel strongly about. The ones that I mentioned. I think that you will find that most of the outrage has come from the Italian Community. There are some national dishes that they do feel very strongly about. The Italian government has even gone so far as to publish and official recipe for bolognese. Regional favorites fall into a completely different category. Take for instance goulash. Every region, every family, and even members within a family all make it differently. I probably made it a few hundred times and I have probably never made it the same way twice. That's how it should be. Food evolves with the times and the availability of ingredients. I suppose that the one thing that irritates me about this topic and keeps me ranting is the bloggers that will take a wonderful classic, change it completely, and call it by it its original title just to have something different to put on their site. Classics became Classics because of their unique flavors and originality. If you want to change it fine, just call it something else.

For those of us that have the means and opportunity, that may be true but in my case just as an example, it becomes even more difficult. I live in Costa Rica and just the other day I was checking something on Amazon and the product cost $17 but it would be $34 shipping. Because I've been in isolation, going to Chinatown or too many of the small specialty shops that carried import items has been out of the question and many of the small specialty shops have closed permanently. During the height of the pandemic they were not considered essential businesses and they just couldn't survive. Some things are classic and call for special ingredients and until I can get them I just won't make them.

There are some classics that when you change the ingredients they completely become something else. I'm afraid I'm a little bit of a purist on this. The hair on the back of my neck goes up when I see recipes or menu items labeled Chicken Caesar, Fettuccine Alfredo with Mushrooms, Salmon Carpaccio. The classic was made one way and one way only and if you change the ingredients, it is no longer that dish. Adding just one word to the title of the recipe would have made a big difference. They could have called it "Carbonara Inspired Tomato Pasta" and I would have been completely fine with it. Jimbo was right when he said that a lot of home cooks don't have an opportunity to resource the proper ingredients, but it is kind of sad to think that this is what a whole lot of people will think real carbonara tastes like.

Fortunately for me, eating at home was never a problem. My mother, who was a very good cook, was not German and our meals were plain old homestyle midwest. My nightmares were the family reunions and the holidays with my father's family. We never had to eat sauerkraut at home.

That might be most of my problem. I can't get a good strong flour here. I need some of that good ol winter wheat.

Never used figs, in fact, no such thing in Nebraska then. All I've ever seen used was prunes and raisins and lots of other dried fruit. But mostly prunes and raisins.

Do you have a good recipe or can you find one? Unfortunately, my grandmother did not write down her her recipes anywhere. To be perfectly truthful, I'm not even sure that she knew how to read or write. I have tried quite a few recipes from the internet and could never get the bread to rise. We thought about keeping one batch so that if anybody tried to break into the house we could beat them to death with it. I finally converted the flavors ingredients to a quick bread so that I get the taste but not the texture. Strangely enough, one of the flavors in the bread is anise. If you could help me out on this I would be eternally grateful. Thank you.

This reminds me of another hated German food from my childhood. Every year my grandmother made a couple tons of springerle cookies and they were required eating. To me, they were nasty little squares of anise-flavored plaster of Paris. Oh how I hated them! I always had visions of my teeth breaking off at the roots and even if you soaked them in something hot they still had that terrible anise flavor. To this day, I hate the taste or smell of anise. I used to tell my girls that licorice was made from everything that was scooped up from the factory floor at the end of the day just so they wouldn't ever want to eat it around me. Christmas time did have one good point for me because she made a black German fruit bread called snitzbrot every Christmas. No one else in the family would eat it so I got their share.

Wow! Let's hope they stay this way. My grandson would eat anything at 5 but he was raised in a restaurant atmosphere and had eaten in just about every type that there was.

From your bookmarks into mine.

Thank you, a very interesting presentation. Through his own family history he is able to illustrate the tremendous influence that the Chinese have had on the food of the world.

I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the internet or to television. I've witnessed that influence in action in the 30 years that I've been in Costa Rica. The older generation, 40s and up, would just as soon stay with their beans and rice and arroz con pollo. Maybe once in a while they'll go to McDonald's or KFC but they will not venture out of their food comfort zone. The younger people are more willing to try just about anything. We have sushi restaurants all over the place now. Thirty years ago, no one would have gone to them.

That looks like a wonderful movie and I definitely want to see it. Unfortunately they don't speak any English so it wouldn't be much fun for them. But thank you very much.

And there seems to be no logical rhyme or reason for all of our food preferences. We seem to be born with a natural affinity or abhorrence to certain foods. I have noticed that the way that young children are introduced to new foods does influence their willingness to be more adventurous. But it doesn't reduce those strong likes and dislikes, be it textural, taste, or visual. Speaking of visual, my grandmother had one of the most beautiful patches of asparagus that you would ever see. Each spring we would watch them sprout from the ground. No way was I ever going to eat those things. They were the most disgusting worm like things and there was no way to convince me that they didn't taste like worms. What I wouldn't give to have that worm patch today.

You are much too young to have lived through the elegant days of the dining car. Unfortunately they went the same way that the food went in the airplanes. Many eons ago, I worked for a company that did catering for the airlines and some of the meals that we put out were spectacular. There is just nothing spectacular nowadays about a bag of pretzels. The only time that I ever took a train ride that was long enough to take advantage of the dining car, I was much too poor to participate. By the way, that was when I was 18 and escaping from sauerkraut in Nebraska.

Seriously, you do have to admire people that can survive in conditions like that.

I love your food preferences. When my grandson was little, he would eat anything and he and I loved to go together to find the different foods. And we loved to hunt out the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants and get to know the interesting people that made these things. We lived in Seattle where there were hundreds of them. He's 44 now and has a very versatile food pallet. I'm sure that he would eat hakarl.

I went to the internet and found this, and this is disgusting enough but the young man that wrote the article that I read said that they did it even worse in the area where he lived. They split the shark open and filled it full of other fish and sewed it up before they buried it to ferment (let's be honest about it, it's rotting). Then they ate the whole rotten mess. Taste aside, this can't be good for you. I think those people have had their brains frozen a few too many times.

Some ethnic group in Alaska loves "ice cream" made from frozen whale blubber and strawberries, are you up for that? If so, come to Costa Rica and I'll make you some, as soon as our next shipment of whale blubber comes in.

I'll bet it doesn't cost $1,000 either.