Quarantine Dinner #26: Pasta Fazool

Taste Changes

Some people can eat the same food every day. My wife, for instance, can eat a grilled chicken salad every day. There is a running joke about that in our household…

Jesse has his go-to dishes like curry, pasta, etc.

Me, well, I like to try new things, explore new flavors, and find new ways of cooking. That being said, I hate cleaning up afterward, which normally comes right after exploring new ways of cooking.

So thinking about that, what did I eat on a regular basis 20 years ago, and is it the same?

Does our food taste change every ten years or so?

Let me explain and do an example with Jesse and give a rundown of his food palate.

Teaching Jesse To Try Things

When Jesse was 8, he was not much of an adventurous eater, and I did not want him to turn out like his friends who only ate PB&J sandwiches, pizza, and of course, organic chicken nuggets.

So I decided to change that, and we started to watch Anthony Bourdain’s shows of him eating all kinds of exotic foods, meats, and bugs. He made it sound amazing and completely normal to eat a bug.

That took the stigma away of “eww! Yuck! A bug! I don’t eat that.”

That idea got reinforced through Andrew Zimmern’s show “Bizarre Foods,” which took it to another level.

Now Jesse’s appetite to try new food was ready to go!

This is gonna be fun!

The next step was not to push it, but to make it a special day: try-something-new day, which became Saturday.

So every Saturday, we went somewhere new and exciting to show his taste buds new adventurous cuisines, starting off slow with fatty pork belly. What’s not to like?

The following week, we got takoyaki, which are Japanese octopus balls with dried bonito fish shavings that move like crazy when you drop them on top of hot food. He believed they were alive.

But his favorite thing to eat now is chicken feet. Chicken and duck feet.

Then moving on to mondongo, which is a Dominican soup consisting of tender tripe. Tripe is cow intestines, and it has a sweet and rich consistency to it.

Then we kicked it up to a higher level of seeing what you are eating: whole fish with its head on, whole pigeons, quail, snails in the shell with black bean sauce, chicken feet, frog legs, etc.

And of course, something we had been working up to for a while: bugs.

We ate popcorn mealworms, scorpion candy, and smoked grasshopper tacos.

Now I’m not saying he liked everything, but he liked about 85 percent of the foods. Bugs, on the other hand, he wasn’t too sure of.

Crickets video

You may be thinking, why would I want my kid eating strange foods?

First, strange to who?

And why not broaden his sense of food cultures?

If you look at Americana cookbooks from the 40s and 50s, you will see recipes for possum pie, squirrel fricassee, venison steak, boar bacon, frog legs, alligator, fried rattlesnake, turtles, etc.

So there is more out there than pork, beef, chicken, and fish.

And if you don’t like those options, there are vegetarian and vegan options, or the extreme breatharians.

I have watched his food tastes change. He used to hate onions cooked or raw, but he would try to eat them once a year. Then one year, he liked them!

The following year he was making onion soup, caramelized onions, onion rings, etc.

It makes me happy. I just wanna cry… wait, it’s the onions.

But still, to this day, he hates cooked carrots but likes them raw, likes cooked tomatoes but hates plain raw tomatoes, but likes salsa.

I think this might never change. Or will it?

What Changed For Me

For us adults, going back to what we used to eat, food can be an evolution. Or maybe you moved to a new area with different restaurants. For some people, they never left their hood and still have the same circle of people, so not much has changed for them, including the variations of food.

Example: you grow up in Chinatown, you work in the area, your friends are the same as you and live in the area. You may venture out once in a while, but chances are you are eating local most of the time.

For me, yes, the food I eat now is different than what I used to eat, or I eat less of it.

In the 70s, I had a very limited palate: mostly certain types of Chinese food, burgers, spaghetti, meat loaf, and chicken.

The 80s: sushi, new Chinese dishes, nouvelle cuisine, German food, classic French, and by the mid 80s, local iconic foods from many countries.

The 90s: fusion foods, mixing different styles of cooking and making them unique.

And now I am still exploring.

What did I hate to eat? Cilantro, celery, and any kind of beans, which I like now.

What do I still not like? Brussels sprouts, scones, arepas, and fennel.

I can already hear the gasps…

“Oh, I love Brussels sprouts! Have you had them…?”

Yes, I have had them that way. And about 20 other ways.

NO THANK YOU.

The Pasta Fazool

This is pasta fazool. It is a dish I would have never wanted to eat because it has beans and celery, and it has no real tomato sauce on it.

But now I love it.

I understand how the creamy, delicate cannellini beans pair with the broth from the ground Italian sausage meat, and the sweetness you get from the celery and onions.

While not a real soup, the macaroni fills up with broth and holds it like a soup dumpling. When you bite down, that broth pours out, coating your mouth full of flavor, then topped with fresh grated parmesan cheese…

Every bite hits every flavor node: salty, sweet, sour, spicy, in layers that give it depth.

Yes, I like everything about this dish.