As I write this post I wonder if I am going to get myself in trouble raising issues that are best left alone. But here goes…
I've been mulling over how to describe my cooking so I can expand my reach and better connect with others in the greater food-a-sphere. So, I have begun to follow a wide variety of bloggers on Instagram and Facebook – maybe not the optimum choices, any suggestions? – to find out what they are doing and how they are building audiences through tagging and linking. I look at the long list of tags below these posts and I think, some tags apply, and some are so arcane I can’t even dream up a connection. But then I struggle with tagging and describing almost anything in one word or a series of one -words.
When I cook, I jot things down the ingredients on my phone and then and thenI write up the recipes as best as I can remember all the steps I took to get the result. But, when it comes time to naming the dish or tagging it, I go blank. Descriptive conventions aren't my forte (as evidenced by the fact that as a librarian I was not known for my cataloguing). I am the poster child for cross-categorical errors.
Generally, I don’t think of food from the broadest term like “Italian” and the inverted pyramid to the dish and then to the ingredients. I often don’t have any idea what I am going to cook until I see something that catches my eye. I don’t cook to a plan (except on Thanksgiving). I cook by instinct. I cook by color and whim and what “screams” at me when I am at the green market. I cook whatever I see, wherever I am.
Two Fridays ago, I was in the Shuk a couple of hours before the market closed for Shabbat. It is usually mayhem at this time of the week. Shoppers trying to get last minutes items before the buses stop and vendors trying to hock what’s left of their goods. Usually the green markets are overflowing with fresh herbs and bitter greens. But this Friday, the herb tables were bare and sad looking. Very little parsley and grim, dried-out mint and thyme. So, I walked and walked until I found a stall with a little more to offer. Oodles of cilantro and a handful of fresh parsley. I bought a lot and immediately thought “tabbouleh”.
But…I didn’t have bulgur and I didn’t have mint and very little parley. I had an overwhelming amount of cilantro – the most polarizing herb on the planet – and lemon and olive oil . So, I broke every rule regarding classic tabbouleh - whatever ethnicity you'd like to name - and made a salad from the greens I had, which was primarily cilantro, red onion, hand-rolled couscous. dried apricots and few spicy pecans.
I wanted to call the salad tabbouleh since it sure looked like tabbouleh and even tasted a lot like it, but I hesitated. How can something be called tabbouleh when it doesn’t have bulgur or mint or a ton of parsley, be tabbouleh? Worse yet, how do I tag it?
Every time I am ready to publish, I go through this tortuousness. I worry that my tags may be so generic they are virtually meaningless, like #soup or #salad. And why do I need to use #soup when the dish is called “Orange Soup”. Sometimes I am worried that my tags are politically charged, like #tabbouleh or #freekeh, and I’ll spark a cultural war over the spelling of labne or a PC meltdown over who owns hummus.
This conversation in my head gets even more tangled when it comes to describing the whole set(s) of recipes that are on my site. I have tried #Levant which is obscure and antediluvian to say the least and no one under 60 would even click on it. And besides, Wikipedia has decided – or the editors of Wikipedia have decided – that Israel doesn’t fit in the geopolitical range of the Levant since it a term that predates 1948 and is a relic of the 19th century. I sometimes use #middle_eastern but even that is problematic and bound to be politicized. I could use #Mediterranean but that is usually understood to mean Italian. Maybe I should try #Phoenician.
I look at my own categories and realize they are too idiosyncratic to be meaningful for a general audience. C'mon - what is “Yellow Food” as a category? Does not make for a successful cooking blog.
In the end I called it Grains and Greens though any, or none of the terms may be applicable.
BT's Cold Salad of Greens and Grains
Ingredients:
Fresh Greens - 4 bunches. Any combination of the following:
parsley
cilantro
mint
peas shoots
chicory
frisée
chia
purslane
mizuna
moringa
bay rocket
Grains: - 1 cup cooked, rinsed and cooled. Any combination of the following:
couscous
pearl barley
bulgur wheat
wheat berries
spelt
fregola
freekeh (green wheat)
quinoa
Fruit - 1/2 cup. Any of the following:
pomegranate seeds
currants
zaresh (barberries)
raisins
chopped dates
Nuts - handful roasted. Any of the following:
pine nuts
pistachios
spicy walnuts
pecans
1 small diced red onion
1/2 cup fruit olive oil
juice of 2 lemons
sprinkle of salt
Directions:
Wash greens thoroughly
Dry
Fine chop greens add to bowl
Add red onions
Mix olive oil, lemon juice and salt
Dress greens and refrigerate if not serving immediately
Right before serving add fruit and nuts and toss
Enjoy! !בתיאבון
#salad #tabbouleh #greens #vegan #herbs #parsley #cilantro #fresh #middleeastern #levant #mint #summer #light #vegan
Comentários