Rating: Edible

Good morning!


Last night we ate at Coco's because Ben had our car all day and we could not go to the supermarket.  If all these people didn't have to have such peculiar diets,  I could well have made a good supper at home without another market visit.  And it would have been better than Coco's fare.


Edible is the lowest positive rating, for restaurants, for me.  Edible applies to a lot of my own cookery, may I say?   So  I am not being stuck-up.  It's just that. Edible. Above edible, we can have good, very good, and delicious.  When we ate the Thai dinner, it could have been delicious but it was not, quite.  It was good--fresh foods, prettily presented.  The tastes were little pallid, I thought.  So--good.


The very good rating applies in my memory to individual dishes I have made or eaten out, rather than to a place or a meal as a whole. I have not had a meal which tasted uniform on the rating system, even Chez Panisse.  There was a lot I did not fall for in my meal there, even the dessert.  It was all very good but not all delicious. It's easy to make a delicious dessert, for example.  Not easy to make a delicious meat course: too many shifting elements go toward the whole; it has to be balanced carefully.  Not easy for me to make a good salad, especially now, for some reason.  Too much water on  the greens? That is probably my big flaw.  In a restaurant, too much sugar in the dressing, especially in these days when the Old Devil Sugar has entered menus big time.  But my dressings tend to be watery a lot of the time. 


I used to make the perfect dressing every day. I tore my own romaine and tossed out the hard white stuff. Then I followed the advice of the cookbook writer George Bradshaw:  add the olive oil first, just a little bit. Toss until every leaf is coated and it takes quite a while if you just use a little oil. At that time we could still buy Spice Islands Tarragon White Wine Vinegar which they no longer produce for some reason.  I'd sprinkle a little of that onto the salad and toss some more, and last would add salt and pepper and toss and serve.  Sometimes I'd add a little dry mustard to it, but never never sugar. My kids loved it and Ben has recently asked me about it trying to identify the elusive anise-like hint of just the right amount of tarragon.


I think that the vogue for Indochinese cuisines has made the sugary taste popular.  My mother always told me that the Chinese cooks used sugar as a taste enhancer, and they have gone overboard in the USA for sure.  


My sister no. 2 used to make the best Texas-flavored salads I ever ate. She used iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, green bell pepper rings,  onion rings, and a dressing of (not olive) oil, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper.  Perfect served icy-cold,  at midday dinner on a hot Texas day.  Doesn't sound any beyond edible, does it? But it was. I guess you just had to be there.  YAZZYBEL