7
votes
What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Thanks to digestive issues, my diet for the foreseeable future is entirely made up of bananas, applesauce, plain toast, and water.
😑
That sounds... Painful.
Wishing you a speedy recovery
Sorry to hear it - elimination diet?
No, it’s just to fix digestion so it’s temporary. Hopefully it’s not an infection or parasite.
That's a hard journey, and I hope you get things sorted out quickly. Hopefully not an allergy or autoimmune issue, though - at least bacterial and parasitic infections are curable.
Yesterday (Sunday) I decided to make a big chicken pasta for a few weeknight meals. Bought a kilo of chicken thigh from the butcher (i.e. expensive), some quality cherry tomatoes, onion, cheap white wine (you don't cook with good wine), lemons, garlic, fresh parsley.
The first alarm bell came when chopping up the chicken. It had a slightly odd smell. Not a bad smell like rotten meat would have, just something that caused my brain to feel a bit uneasy. This concerned me but I figured it was fine, I literally just bought the chicken a few hours prior, it had been in a well-temped fridge nearly that entire time, it was probably just some juices in the bag or whatever. There was a sunk-cost emotion at play here too: I only buy meat once every week or two max for reasons of environmentalism and anti-cruelty, and when I do buy it I'm happy to pay extra for a more sustainable product from a good butcher.
I cooked the chicken thoroughly, took it out, sautéed the onions for 15 minutes until they were beautifully caramelised, added the cherry tomatoes (chopped in half), garlic, a few chilli flakes, deglazed with wine, lemon, re-added the chicken, and seasoned. Let it simmer for only few minutes until it had come together a bit (everything was already cooked), then finished the pasta in it with a healthy dose of pasta water for creaminess. It looked lovely.
Served. Topped with parmesan. Took the first bite.
The chicken was bad.
I don't think I did anything wrong on my end: It was cooked thoroughly, my fridge is more than cold enough. I think the butcher just gave me some meat that was on the turn. It wasn't fully off yet, but from that first bite I could just tell that it wasn't right. In hindsight I imagine the 40-degree heatwave this week probably played a part here. I think most of the chicken was fine, but my trust was broken entirely. I ate about a quarter of a meal in denial before just chucking the whole thing out. The worst part is that I had guessed from the start that it might end up this way just with how that chicken smelled on the cutting board, but I chalked it up to a bit of health anxiety (which I have in spades) and opted to not trust my gut, forgetting that my gut has been designed over millions of years to prevent me eating the bad things.
Went and got Chinese takeout instead. Cumin lamb, it's delicious. Pro tip, cook your rice at home and buy the main meal at the restaurant. A while back I made a big jar of a Sichuan chilli oil (called xiangyou; note that there are a lot of Sichuan chilli oils) and I've been putting that on basically everything even vaguely East Asian, it's brilliant.
My stomach feels weird today. Praying to all deities that might be listening.