I realized this holiday that apparently my secret shameful food snobbery was out when friends and relatives gave me some Himalayan pink salt, Nepali Birae Noon (black salt from India) and a jar containing two especially evil looking truffles, imported from France. Sure, I am a culinary tourist and plan my vacations around dinner reservations but I didn’t think it was, well, so freaking obvious. Sigh.
The thing I don’t understand is that sure, crazy salt addiction aside, half of the stuff that is considered gourmand isn’t even that big of a deal. For instance, chevre is much lower in fat than cream cheese, has actual protein and tastes a million times better, so why on earth would you ever bother with the Philly? And I always get eyebrow raises when I make my favorite appetizer ever, bacon-wrapped dates, but seriously, the recipe is practically the name of the dish! You take bacon and wrap it around a date, and then throw it into the oven until the bacon is done. The end. It’s much less work than anything Sandra Lee ever placed on a tablescape. Maybe I’m not so much an epicurean as a really lazy person who just likes interesting flavors.
Right now, this lazy gourmand is stuck on citrus in all forms. This weekend, I plan to candy some clementine peels and make some bright jars of lemon curd (or maybe key lime curd if I can’t find meyer lemons yet). It’s easy peasy and both will keep away the SAD through the dark weeks of January. And if someone calls you a food snob, you can remind them that it’s just so darned easy to eat fancy that life is too short to eat things out of a box.
