But there's oil in my peanut butter

For years when I was little, my mother always bought natural peanut butter. It was gross, lacked flavor, and you had to stir in the oil before you could spread it on anything. My brothers and I begged and pleaded for "real" peanut butter and my mother finally caved and started buying Jiff. It was probably one of the greatest victories that that Hatgas boys ever won over Mom.

You see, we were the type of family that never (and I mean NEVER) had sugar cereals. We ate Wheaties and Chex and on occasion we were surprised with a box of Kix (which never lasted more than a day). More often than not my mother bought generics so we really didn't eat "Chex" it was more like "Corn Flavored Lattice Squares," but that's besides the point. What I am trying to get at was our breakfast options were pretty limited so I would usually default to peanut butter toast; but that natural stuff was just so nasty.

It's possible that my palate has matured (it's probably more possible that I am just not as lazy to think that the extra step of stirring my peanut butter was worth it), but I really love natural peanut butter now. When I opened up my cupboard this morning to look for a morning meal that natural peanut butter was staring me right in the face. It's funny how things come full circle sometimes.

Thanks Mom.

Umami? Really?

Have you seen those annoying commercials for Kikoman Soy Sauce? Umami the sexy female voice whispers. The fifth taste.

Excuse me?

Then, during some of our favorite food-related shows the so-called food experts made mention of Umami.

This dish has a wonderful Umami finish that is really nice on the palate.

This is getting a little ridiculous, don't you think? I mean, I'm ALL about the avant garde, I love hearing about haute cusine, which is pretty much elaborate preparations and presentations. But what is this damn Umami suddently everyone is talking (or whispering sexily--and yes, sexily is a word) about?

Well, first I found a wikipedia post that described Umami as something having to do with the presence of glutamic acid. Like you, I wondered exactly what glutamic acid was and why I would want it in my food. And why I would refer to it with some weird Japanese based word? I needed to dig deeper.

Did you know that there is a whole website dedicated to Umami? Yes, there is! And thanks to umamiinformationcenter.com, I was able to provide this diagram. Does this clear it up for you?



Yeah, me neither. Did someone actually spend time putting this graph together?

Finally, I found this and it helped clear things up. Apparently Umami is neither salty, sweet, sour, or bitter. It's meat. It's cheese. It's certain vegetables and combinations of flavor. Basically, umami can be translated to "yummy". Really, we need a super snooty word not only to sell soy sauce (which already has a claim on one of the 4, now 5, tastes--SALTY), but also for super snooty intellectual people who call themselves foodies to make us regular eaters feel inferior when they say things like "wonderful umami quality"?

So again, I say that I'm glad to be halfway gourmet if it means I get to say yummy instead of disecting the very act of eating into glutamic acids, glutamates, and taste receptors. As Ina would say "How fun is that?" Not fun at all, Ina. Not fun at all.

Halfway gourmet...

...but completely lazy.

Kel and I have definitely hit some sort of culinary (and otherwise) funk. Which explains why Kelly is off at the store right now looking for a frozen pizza to eat.

Things get tough for us at this time of year. Both of our jobs are at the beginning of the busy season (it never really stops, but still) and my fall classes just started up again so Kelly is on her own for two nights a week. I know we really have no excuses with no kids or anything like that, but sometimes it's just so easy to, well, want to do nothing when you get home from work. We'll get back to it soon, and we'll have more posts for ya'll to read, but tonight it's all about a frozen pizza, a little True Blood, and the Browns game.

Ciao