View from the North 40: So how foodie are you willing to go?

One of the benefits of the modern foodie fascination for people like me is that we can just keep throwing ingredients together with abandon, but now we can attach professional-sounding terms to it and all of a sudden our haphazard cooking process is legit.

When you make chicken something out of whatever you found in the fridge, it’s more eater-friendly to say the meal is “based on a traditional dish from the Oaxaca region of Mexico,” rather than “It’s kind of Mexican ... ish. Maybe.”

“I haven’t killed you with my cooking, yet,” was my actual motto.

FYI, “based on” is a useful phrase that adds a degree of legitimacy that “I made it up” just doesn’t.

So when you get the idea to do something like add hot peppers and chili powder to some chopped up fruit, you just search for some of those key words plus “recipes” and you find out that fruit salsa is a thing. And it inspires you to throw in a little onion and cilantro, too.

When the frozen mangos someone who’s not me brought home from the store turn out to be too mushy and inconsistent in flavor? Throw the salsa in a pan, add vinegar and sugar, and cook it down a bit. Voila! You have made a chutney.

Considering making a syrup out of some fruit, but you forgot it on the stove so long that it’s cooked down so much you have to add water? Hold on. Just leave it like it is, call it a “reduction.”

Cook something so long or so hot that it starts to brown and or crisp when it wasn’t supposed to? Say it’s “caramelized.” Burn it just a bit? That’s “seared.” Burn it more than just a bit? It’s “pizza night.”

You can’t save them all.

Too lazy to assemble a recipe properly? Like I really hate recipes that you have to cook twice: fully cook several elements then assemble them and bake them in the oven. Just cook the separate elements and serve them as the entree and side dishes. Say that it’s based on whatever the recipe is but “reimagined” in its basic elements.

Are you totally winging it on flavors and ingredients? It’s a “fusion” of flavors, styles and regional cooking. Whatever works.

I once had everything for a shrimp chow mein cooking, realized I didn’t have any soy sauce so I switched to Mexican spices and added sour cream to make a “white sauce.” I served it with the noodles and called it Asian-Mexican fusion.

People ate it. Called me brilliant. Your confusion is understandable.

The one thing I’m not really into is that foraging trend. Sure I’ll pick berries, wild asparagus, mint, wild onions, a few flowers, you get the gist — basically things I would grow in a garden if I had the soil, water and even the least hint of a green thumb.

Notice that nowhere on that list did you see words like insects, grubs and snakes. Just like you won’t see tripe or other innards.

Practically every culture has traditional innards recipes, and I have eaten some when prepared for me, but you’ll never hear me say something like, “I didn’t know what to cook so I threw together this kidney-earthworm pie based on an old Irish family recipe, infused it with an emulsified fish foam. It really kicks in at the back end of your palate. Right?”

I could make other foods, like balut, but I won’t. I can imagine situations in which I would end up trying it, but in general I prefer the chicken or the egg, not something that’s partially transitioned from one to the other. Even if it’s fully cooked. Just sayin’.

It’s like the kopi luwak coffee, the one made from coffee beans that were eaten and passed through the entire digestive tract of the civet, a cat-like mammal, to be harvested from their feces. I read somewhere that the preparation and consumption of this coffee bean originated in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule and the Indonesians weren’t allowed to harvest coffee cherries for their own consumption.

I’m sure the Dutch overlords were like, “Um, yeah, keep your cat-poop coffee. We’re a hard pass on that.”

Joke’s on them, though. It’s now the most expensive coffee on the market.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for Indlovu gin, the hot new alcohol out of South Africa.

Reuters reported in February that makers Les and Paula Ansley started the gin-making business in 2018, deliberately filtering the alcohol through elephant dung. Yes, elephant dung personally selected by Les for its aged-to-perfection aroma — to give the gin that nouveau-classic fragrance of botanicals, fruits and seeds still in the dung because, apparently, elephants don’t have good digestive tracts to break plants down.

Ansley’s sell the gin in Woolworths and Pick ‘n’ Pay in South Africa and export it to the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Taiwan.

One bartender told Reuters, “It is earthy. That’s what makes it different.”

See? Choose the right foodie language and anything sounds edible.

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It’s gin — it can strip the paint off old cars, so I’m sure it can sterilize dung at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .