Food, People and Geography

Last night, I made some Indian inspired rice, a small salad with only four ingredients, and grilled some beef inspired by the memory of a dish I love: Tiger Tear Salad. Somehow, in my head I could mix a few ingredients without looking at a recipe and add some lemon to the greens and have something similar to that salad. I was wrong. I will need much more than that to capture those flavors.

A couple of weeks ago, I got some unpleasant news from the doctor and she told me to reduce the salt  to  2g per day (my daily sodium intake should be that or lower). That made me think about my not so responsible diet and the things I like to cook. Not that I eat junk food, but I haven't been cooking for myself the way I should. I guess being single plays a role in that. I love salt. In Brazil, our main seasoning happens to be salt. When the doctor gave me the news, I was thinking how can I stop eating cheese? How can I reduce eating something that makes me usually eat at all? I have this weird interesting problem with eating. I love to cook and I like to eat, but I can go hours without eating. I am a picky eater (of some sorts) and I like mostly homemade foods or ethnic dishes I cannot prepare myself.  

It was not long ago that I was craving a Thai red curry and went out to a neighborhood restaurant to please my palate. The dish was good, but a customer from a table nearby decided that he wanted to talk (to me, that is) and he kind of spoiled my own treat to myself. The bill also spoiled it to some degree and especially because I decided to add a glass of plum wine to the whole ritual and an appetizer., which made the evening  much more expensive than I had planned it to be. Soon after that episode and the doctor's recommendations, I started thinking about learning how to cook Asian dishes that are (for the most part) tasty and healthy. Take India, for instance. Indian cuisine is colorful, tasty and delicious. Salt is secondary for them and yet Indian dishes are so flavorful and I can see myself eating those dishes on a fairly regular basis. Compared to  the Southern cuisine of Brazil, they do know how cook! I do like Brazilian food a lot, but I am kind of tired of it. Also, I need (these days) more veggies, more spices, more flavor and overall Brazilian food doesn't offer all of that (to me). 

So, last night I ventured into cooking an Indian inspired rice and also made (my own version of)  kheer (Indian rice pudding) for dessert. I used very little salt and I was surprised to find myself content with not bringing it to the table. I made a cucumber salad marinated in rice vinegar topped with a pinch of crushed red pepper to add some color and fire to the refreshing cucumbers and added lemon and black pepper to the arugula. Rice vinegar is a delicious, mild and almost sweet Japanese (?) invention. It added so much taste to the cucumbers I didn't even remembered what salt was. To finish my little feast, I served a little bit of hummus, on the side, with pita chips.

This whole salt discussion and strict diet made me think of the patient Oliver Sacks discusses on the first chapter of his book (An Anthropologist on Mars) who suffers of colorblindness. He is a painter. He sees the world through the lenses of color. He listens to music and he sees color. He enjoys his migraines because they're colorful. Not at all after he develops a mysterious case of colorblindness, it's like color died to him altogether. At first, it seemed like the no salt diet to me was some kind of colorblindness of the palate. Salt (or so I thought!) made food more colorful. Now, I see that I have some alternatives, while the painter in the book might not be as lucky as me.

PS. Apparently, rice vinegar is Cantonese, not Japanese as I thought.