Cheese and cakes and salads

 

Happy Sunday!  

This coming weekend we have gougères and autumn spice cake with cream cheese frosting ready for ordering.  For the following weekend, we have lemon sablés and molasses cookies with lemon.  

As I was thinking this week about the upcoming winter season and various things I want to cook for the autumn and winter menu offerings, I also thought back to the summer months and some of the salads I made.  It's amazing to think how simple a salad can be and yet how satisfying at the same time.  One of my favorite quick go-to salads this past summer was tri-color cabbage chopped up roughly, shredded carrots, a healthy sprinkling of grated parmesan cheese and a creamy honey mustard dressing.  Every time I fixed this salad and ate it, I found myself ready to make it again at the next meal.  Four simple ingredients, no fancy preparation, nothing extraordinary, just simple good food that was wholesome and delicious and required extremely little time to prepare.  When I eat things like this that are so full of flavor, I often notice that some other processed things are significantly lacking in flavor by comparison.  Sometimes even a piece of candy that usually tastes delicious seems to have only a sugar flavor as my sense of taste has been somewhat altered so that I am truly noticing how much or how little flavor is actually in some of the processed foods we eat.

This is not to say that I'm against processed foods in general.  It's just curious to note how often they don't really seem to have that much flavor when eaten side by side with something that is naturally flavorful and wholesome.  Perhaps at some point some of these processed foods were simply something delicious in someone's kitchen that then were altered as a result of their transition to mass-produced commercial food products.

Just an interesting food thought I happened to have tonight.  Nothing earth-shattering or profound.  But an interesting thought nonetheless.

Have a great week everyone.  Colder weather is undoubtedly the way and that means soon we can start thinking about hot chocolate on frigid mornings.