Gourmet food. Some people call food gourmet when it absolutely dazzles the eye and the taste-buds. 50 imported ingredients, hours and hours of preparation, and 20 cooks in the kitchen preparing it for you. As Julia Child said, “It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.”
Many people, intimidated by such complex gourmet cooking, settle instead for fast food and prepackaged, convenience food with laboratory concocted flavors. Luckily, there’s another approach: simple food, prepared well.
Simple and Easy Gourmet Food
Contrary to the elitist connotation often attributed to the word, gourmet can simply mean using quality ingredients. The key is to cook mainly with fresh, in-season, local ingredients, focusing on fresh, natural flavors. You don’t have to give up a food just because it’s not in season, but for the fullest flavor, try recipes with at least one or two seasonal ingredients. Then use cooking methods that attempt to preserve and enhance these flavors – no need for excessive processing; nature has already done a wonderful job of making things taste good!
Still, many gourmet cooks assume that more ingredients, more flavors, more processing, more everything is better. In contrast, the good food philosophy of cooking is this: allow the natural flavors of the food to surface, enhance them, compliment them, but never cover them up. Basically, in order to get good natural flavors, you have to start with good ingredients.
Fresh Local Ingredients Make for Quick & Easy Gourmet Recipes
Foods naturally taste good: that’s why we eat them. It’s only when food is mass produced and then shipped thousands of miles that its flavor needs a pick-me-up. Tomatoes in supermarkets, for instance, are often picked under-ripe and allowed to finish ripening while spending days or even weeks in transport and on display, leading to bland flavors. In contrast, anyone who’s ever eaten a fresh tomato, picked that morning from a neighbor’s garden, understands that such a tomato needs no help in tasting good. The several-week-old supermarket tomato, on the other hand, needs all the help it can get. In addition, transporting foods from the other side of the country - or worse, from the other side of the world - when they are available from local farmers, uses up valuable resources needlessly. Plus, fresh, in-season produce bought straight from the farmer is usually less expensive.
Gourmet Cooking at Home
If you want good food in your own home, don’t worry, you don’t have to go all out and turn the whole yard into vegetable rows. Consider having a few of your favorite herbs in pots on the kitchen window sill, or plant a small herb bed in the yard. Many herbs are ornamental as well as practical and generally low maintenance, so add a few to the landscaping. Even just a handful of these fresh herbs tossed into a jar of spaghetti sauce will instantly brighten the flavors. You may find this to be enough and stop there. Or you may want to continue further down the path to good food. You might start a vegetable garden, you might begin to visit farmer’s markets and get to know the people in your area who grow the good stuff. And you may never again be intimidated by gourmet cooking, and better yet, you may never want to retrace your steps back to that fast cheap, convenient food that is anything but good.
Truly, you don’t have to entirely given up extravagant French cookery, either. Go on, make that consommé or attempt that soufflé. Life deserves a little indulgence now and then. The point is that even those who don’t have the time or the inclination to create culinary masterpieces can still enjoy good, fresh, healthy, flavorful food without spending all day in the kitchen. Just remember that it’s easy to make good food if you use good ingredients.
An Easy Gourmet Recipe to Try at Home
Try this simple but good recipe at home: Shrimp and Corn Chowder
Note on Canned or Frozen Foods
It’s true, fresh is generally preferable. However, certain foods preserve well and can taste pretty good even frozen or canned. For instance, canned tomatoes are generally picked when ripe and then canned almost immediately, giving them lots of flavor, in contrast to the typical supermarket tomato. While fresh and local is preferable, if you must choose between making sauces with stale, flavorless, supposedly “fresh” supermarket tomatoes and the convenience and flavor of a can of picked-when-ripe tomatoes, pick the latter. Similarly, flash-freezing keeps most berry flavors intact and allows you to enjoy the berries at a fraction of the cost of fresh berries.
In general, canned or frozen vegetables such as green beans, spinach, carrots, etc. are very much inferior to the fresh alternatives. Fresh meats and seafood have a lovely firm texture that gets lost in the freezer. Frozen ravioli will never taste as good as fresh. Just remember that some foods are suitable for long-term preservation, others are not.
Laura Jennings - Ok, here goes. About me, I am definitely a foodie - I graduated from the Scottsdale Culinary Institute in 2001 and I worked at some ...
