Week 7 -- Pretend to be a food critic

This is a game I play with myself sometimes, and it usually makes me laugh and have to share my cleverness with others. If you've followed me for awhile, you'll know that I used to do product reviews. I stopped for a couple of reasons:

1) Thanks to the advocacy work of places like where I work, there are a million gluten-free products out there, only one of me, and products come and go out of production, so it felt like something I just couldn't keep up with. Sort of like local restaurant reviews. (I was so sad when Pure Tacos closed!).

2) I get to do some product reviews anyway, for my Day Job. You can check out my poetic reviews at www.GlutenFreeHotProducts.com, and I frequently share my faves on my facebook page too.) I actually love that part of my job and volunteer to do reviews for a change of pace.

So the game I play when trying a new restaurant or gluten-free food is to imagine how I would write my chichi review for an upscale magazine, like the New Yorker (it was my dad's favorite magazine, which is curious, because he was born, raised and lived most of his life in Oklahoma and I don't think he ever visited New York. But I digress.) Take a look at some of these New Yorker quotes from restaurant reviews:

An Alsatian accent distinguishes this fancy French restaurant in a time that is kind to neither fancy nor French food.

Oiji’s delicate, subtle incarnations of bibimbap and fried chicken are a world away from the chaos of Koreatown.

Just under half of the twenty-eight seats in the restaurant are bar height, but these are the most comfortable stools you’ll ever sit in—upholstered and generously wide for the chic, slim patrons, many of them longtime vegans with the youthful glow of abstemiousness.

You get the idea.

So, imagine the food review for something a little less... New York. I recently made myself a gluten-free vegan version of chili pie. Since I too am from Oklahoma, the Frito Pie, made famous in the land of Sonic Drive-In, is a fond memory for me. Basically, it's chili over corn chips. Here's my review:

As a throwback to the 70's, the generous portion of Protéine végétale texturée chili atop the montange du tortillas mais frit demonstrated an exquisite balance of sweet and salty, spicy and umami. Though the presentation was informal, the quality and quantity of the delicacy overshadowed this detail. The dish could have been brightened with the inclusion of salad of delicate, hand-massaged field greens accoutered in a raspberry-balsamic marinade. Translation: The big pile of vegetarian chili over chips tasted good. A salad would have been nice.) If you need some ideas, randomly throw in a foreign word, put it in an unusual order, pick a something from the verbs list and join it with a word from the nouns list and try it with almost any food:

Verbs:
Dredged with
Coated with
Moistened with
Kissed by
Enveloped by
Dusted with

Nouns:
Freshly-ground black pepper
A delicate bouquet of paprika and Himalayan sea salt
A crusting of rice and corn shavings
Aztec mole spices
choptle-infused aioli
Kale (that one's just to see if my family reads my blog!)

So, canned green bean casserole could be: Sublime beans vert coated with a delicate bouquet of paprika and Himalayan sea salt and enveloped by a crusting of rice and corn shavings. ;-)

Have fun!