Try new foods and improve my palate

I am not doing so well with this goal. I don’t even know if it is possible for me to improve my palate at this stage of the game. I believe it’s time to retire this goal and move on to accepting where I am with food. I will continue to try things that strike me as appealing, but I am not going out of my way to do this, so it’s not really an active goal for me.

ordered blackened cajun salmon for dinner- big step for me- I’m not normally a fish eater, but I’m trying

I’m finding that as I try more and more healthy food, my tastes are slowly shifting…the junk just doesn’t taste as good to me anymore. And that was really the point of this whole exercise. So…moving on.

Here’s the “must try” list:

Voortman’s flax seed cookies (they’re oatmeal cookies with flax seeds in them…as far as cookies go, they’re not bad at all)
Snyder’s sunflower chips (basically Sun Chips with sunflower seeds in them—what makes them great is the “lightly salted” variety)
Stacy’s pita chips (not so much salty as crunchy…and tasty)
Hummus (I want to try more flavors now, and as a sandwich spread)
Whole grain tortilla shells (Sometimes you just want to eat things out of a tube, and these lessen the guilt factor. They’re fragile, though.)

Ate at a mediterranian restaurant Saturday night. pretty good stuff

I’ve had this recipe marked for a while, and since I finally got a good sourdough starter, I decided to try it. And it is excellent! I ate it with a can of veggie lentil soup…very filling and tasty. Though I think I’ll wait until fall is properly here before I make it again; it’s really better suited for chilly nights.

Red and yellow ones, to be exact. (I already know I’m not crazy about green ones.) I’ve always avoided them because I don’t like the smell, but I’ve found I do enjoy foods with the flavor in them – just so long as it’s not the only flavor, you know? So tonight I made some soup…part recipe, part improvisation. (Yeah, I didn’t want to go to the store.) It’s a red pepper/tomato-based soup; my take on it had one red and one yellow pepper (plus the called-for garlic), roasted and pureed with some V-8 (my substitute for tomatoes), then mixed with vegetable broth. My add-ins: dried minced onion, celery salt, chili powder, cumin, black pepper, bay leaves, some corn, and kidney beans. I ate it over rice instead of putting pasta in it, and froze the rest in individual bowls. Very tasty. I may have to tinker with this and create a recipe.

1. Roasted, unsalted almonds (the raw almonds are also good, but a bit mushy). They are my new addiction.

2. Flat Earth brand Tomato Ranch baked veggie crisps. Chips that I don’t have to feel so guilty about eating. Naturally, they’re a bit hard for me to find, but well worth the hunt!

Mmm. The frozen kind, of course, but still. I was a little unsure while cooking them, because I’d never had one before…and it’s real darn hard to cook something when you’ve never eaten it! (Is it supposed to be soft? Crunchy? Light brown? Golden brown?)

Anyway, regardless of whether or not I got them right, they taste delicious. I’m eating way, way too many of them as a result.

Like a Mango milkshake. Delicious!