Why just ONE?

Diet Pepsi is labelled, and has been marketed, as no-calorie since its introduction in 1964. Originally, it was sweetened by saccharin, but the formula was changed in the 1980s to use aspartame in order to avoid the metallic aftertaste often associated with saccharin. Aspartame is still the principal sweetener of Diet Pepsi, though now supplemented by acesulfame potassium. If you pick up a can of Diet Pepsi, and look at the nutritional information on the back, it will read zero calories, due to its total lack of sugar, in contrast to ordinary Pepsi, which is usually sweetened by corn syrup (or cane sugar, depending on the region). Of course, the lack of calories is the selling point for any diet soda like Diet Pepsi, and for a diet beverage, you really can't beat that - zero calories, I mean. There's nowhere else to go, no further reduction in food energy that can be made. Pepsi completely removed the sugar, and wouldn't you know it, the result was a no-calorie drink. Problem solved. Diet achieved.

But in 1998, Pepsi launched a new diet soda under the style of Pepsi ONE (rather obnoxiously spelled with all caps so that it's impossible to type the name without looking like a jackass). Pepsi ONE, which is, of course, still sold today, and quite popular, is an artificially sweetened version of Pepsi's flagship cola, much like Diet Pepsi. I often have wondered why it exists - the launch of another, parallel diet cola brand in the Pepsi pantheon seems intuitively counterproductive for Pepsi. Wouldn't they simply compete with one another? Is there a difference, and what is it? Just what is the deal with Pepsi ONE?

Secret Ingredient Improv IV: A Caribbean trip

It is Friday again which means I get to go shopping for ingredients and watch how Ian "transforms" them into dinner. I don't like shopping alone. I also don't like spending a lot of time in the supermarket either. Ian does. Ian in the supermarket is like a lady in a shoe shop. He has to pick up every bottle, jar or can and consider buying it, especially if he cannot read the labels. I, on the other hand, only go shopping with a list in my hand. I can't just casually walk into a supermarket and buy a jar of Branston pickle. I'm like the guy who needs a new pair of jeans so he walks in the first store and buys a pair of jeans and drives back home. Done.

I have a lot of difficulty putting four ingredients together for our improv cooking nights. I don't want to make it too easy, I don't want to make it too hard and most importantly I want to have a nice dinner. For me the improv cooking is not about weird ingredients. It is about experience. It is about forcing Ian to cook with something he has little experience with. For me it is all about learning and knowing the ingredients and once in a week having the courage to think out of the box and create a new thing.

A long time ago, Ian bought this jar of rocoto peppers which we ended up never using. So that automatically goes on the list. I hate it when we buy things and don't use them. I got an email from a blog reader, Kendall, who had mango on his list and we have actually never cooked with mango before, we only eat it as a fruit so I thought that will be interesting. I also get some chicken tights because I wanted chicken and not fish sticks for dinner. And finally I get some plantains. I think I just crave fried plantains.

So these are my four ingredients for Ian:

Rocoto peppers
Mango
Chicken thighs
Plantains

Secret Ingredient Improv III: A Man Named Gorton

After my rather lackluster performance last week, it was Mariam's turn this week to cook for Secret Ingredient Improv, and my turn to shop. It's tempting, when purchasing the secret ingredients, to be mean. It's tempting to buy crazy things that are impossible to cook together - cheez whiz and caramel apples, for instance. It's tempting to pick these things up from the supermarket shelves and laugh, laugh like a maniac thinking about how she could possibly make dinner from just four different kinds of non-dairy milk, or Reese's pieces and whitefish caviar. Yes, the shopping is fun.

But I also remember, of course, that whatever I buy for her to cook with, I will be eating for dinner. This is the restraint. This keeps Secret Ingredient Improv interesting, but sane. It must be possible, in some strange way, perhaps, but still possible, for the ingredients I get to be combined into something resembling a decent meal. Last time Mariam cooked, in our first Secret Ingredient Improv, I thought I did a good job getting her interesting ingredients that didn't look like they went together, and I think she did a good job proving that intuition wrong.

The hardest part, for me, when shopping, has been the selection of an interesting and unorthodox protein for the meal. One doesn't just want to buy chicken thighs - there are simply too many "standard" things to do in that case. We have too much familiarity with that ingredient - it's no longer much of a challenge. Of course, last week I thought initially that Mariam was being kind to me by giving me beef, but the challenge came from the way the beef had been pre-prepped into thin strips. This week, I thought about that - about how the preparation of an otherwise ordinary ingredient might make it interesting or difficult to work with.

So this week, I got her:
Frozen fish sticks
Branston pickle
Kale
Green acorn squash

Ratatouille

Since the first time I watched the movie Ratatouille, I always wanted to make the dish but not in the traditional way, in the way it was made in the movie by Remy, the rat. Ratatouille is a French provincial stewed vegetable dish traditionally made from tomatoes, onions, garlic, eggplants, zucchinis, bell peppers and herbs like basil and marjoram. I recommend this dish to every vegetarian and to meat lovers as well. If you have not seen the movie Ratatouille, I recommend watching the cooking scenes here.

I learn from Wikipedia (of course) that Remy's take on the traditional Ratatouille was the work of Chef Thomas Keller and later became known as confit byaldi.

Secret Ingredient Improv II: Cooking with Arnold Palmer

As you know Ian and I started our own version of Chopped. Every Friday one of us goes shopping and buys 4 secret ingredients for the other to use in an entree. We don't have a time limit but we do want dinner at the table at some point.

I did the first round and I really enjoyed cooking with ingredients that you don't normally put together, it needs a bit courage but it helps you understand your ingredients and develop a deep idea on how food flavors, textures, smells and color work together. It forces you to make something new which is what I really like about our improv cookings.

It was my turn to buy the ingredients. I had one in mind. It was tea. Yes tea. I know it is crazy but Ian always had this crazy idea of cooking with tea and he had theories of how to incorporate it into a stew. But, he never actually tried to do it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to let him live his dream.

I bought these four ingredients:
Beef, cut in strips for stir fry
Brussel sprouts
sunflower seeds
Arizona lite half and half Arnold Palmer (a half and half mixture of black tea and lemonade)

Secret Ingredient Improv

IAN:
This is the first in what we hope will become a series of posts about secret ingredient cooking. Everybody is familiar with Iron Chef, the television show in which a competitor must cook a five course meal with every course incorporating a specific secret ingredient. Mariam and I prefer the show on Food Network called Chopped, wherein competitors must cook a single course in each round, each time incorporating all four of the ingredients in a secret ingredient basket. Frequently, these ingredients are strange or unusual, and almost always, the combination of ingredients is intuitively very weird. But usually these chefs manage to pull off something that, at least in theory, sounds like it ought to be pretty good, and the tasting judges often agree (though sometimes, disasters happen). It's improvisational cooking at its finest.

We were inspired by Chopped to try this ourselves. We like improv cooking - usually because we're too lazy to go look up a recipe and drive to the market to get the one or two ingredients we don't have, so we just make something up with what we've got in the fridge. I think improv cooking - that is, just cooking something on the fly with no recipe - is the test of a competent cook. Following directions is pretty easy, but to cook without directions, without a recipe, one has to understand the ingredients and techniques very well. It's also, of course, an opportunity to experiment - and that's why we wanted to try something like Chopped, with secret ingredients. It's an opportunity to experiment and try to understand ingredients and combinations of ingredients we've had no or little experience with in the past.

Our Secret Ingredient Improv works like a single round of Chopped with a looser time restriction. Four secret ingredients are provided, and the cook must prepare a single course using all four ingredients. For our first round, I selected four ingredients for Mariam to cook dinner. She had access otherwise to everything in our kitchen, which I tried to stock with as many ordinary or essential ingredients as possible, to give her all the options she could have.

This time, the secret ingredients were:
Mint Chutney
Tomatillos
Soppressata
Ground Dried Shrimp