Mediterranean food
Eating is one of the most pleasures things that one can do. It fed us, which a survival needs of all animals and if the food is good it will make us enjoy eating it. The topic of food opens several discussions: famine, the bad food, and bad eating habits, the way that food is made, animal vs. vegetal, the way animals are transported and killed. However, in this post, I will focus on the good parts of eating (and cooking) — Nevertheless, I should write about the other problems on another post.
Fortunately, I was born in a country where people use(d) to care a lot about cooking and eating. Portugal has a Mediterranean cuisine, we use a lot of olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and herbs. We eat many kinds of cereal like wheat, and we use it to do bread and beer. We have a lot of fruit and vegetables, the later we use in several dishes, like soup, salads, and heavy dishes with cooked vegetables, e.g., Cozido à Portuguesa. We eat a lot of fish and seafood since sea surrounds us. However, the most “typical” fish in Portugal is imported from Norway, then we dried, codfish. We are one of the few countries that dry the codfish, and maybe it was our idea in the first place. We also have much fresh fish like sardines. Finally, we also eat much meat. For a long time, we ate much pork, the poor people in the countryside only could manage to buy and feed them, then everything was used to eat — I mean everything!
Although I am writing about eating, it is impossible not to refer that great wine tradition we have.
At least until my generation, we were used, as a child, to eat all traditional dishes from our grandmothers and mothers. Therefore, we have all the palate educated for these flavors. The globalization brought us a lot of different foods — I am not judging it, it is normal, and I like it — like Mcdonalds, pizzas, sushi, Chinese food, Indian, etc., etc. Not long ago the women were domestic then every dinner would be a great meal prepared with love and good ingredients. Nowadays, the woman role (fortunately!) is no longer at home, and then people often prefer to cook something quick.
I love to try new foods, but I love our Portuguese cuisine. When I cook, I try to create new dishes, but I (think I) keep some of our pure ingredients and flavors. For me, it is hard to believe that some people don’t care about food, don’t enjoy eating or cooking. That eat whatever is in front of them. The more good food we eat, the more educated we become, we increase our palate’s knowledge. We start to understand our History and how we should eat. These input test cases are built manually, and they typically are tuned for a particular application.
Jun 6| 365 Days of Writing Prompts | Red pill, blue pill: If you could get all the nutrition you needed in a day with a pill — no worrying about what to eat, no food preparation — would you do it?
