Monday February 15th, 2010 What's for dinner?

I've been looking over my "The Kind Life" cookbook by Alicia Silverstone for about two months now, thinking how great some of the recipes look but not daring to try any because they mainly included ingredients that a)I could not pronounce b) I definitely did not have in my pantry.

But this weekend I wrote down all the ingredients in the book that were unknown in my world and headed out to the farmer's market with a girlfriend and guess what? Low and behold one of the first ingredients was right there at table number 3, pickled Daikon. My friend and I decided to give it a shot and actually really enjoyed it. It tasted like radish mixed with coleslaw somehow..delish. My friend liked it so much she got some of her own. We walked on further and found regular Daikon, the ingredient I was looking for. In a very shy manner I asked for "one" without knowing which one was good, ripe, unripe, etc. The man behind the tent, took his time searching for the "perfect" one to give me or I guess it could have been the most "unperfect" one to give me, since either way I would have gladly paid for it and been thankful. In my eyes they all really did look the same.

Nonetheless I proceeded to make it an adventuresome outing, buying vegetables that I hadn't tried and continued this at wholefoods and publix greenwise. Finding all but two of the ingredients mentioned in the book, Umeboshi Vinegar and Mochi (which I found I could order online now, so I will do that soon). Now seen as how for the next few weeks I'll be trying out a lot of ingredients that I've never tasted before, I'm going to guess, I might not like some of them. So in that case, well I'll just hope I have a backup plan for dinner and I'll make sure to be completely honest of what I thought of the recipe, but please remember that it's solely an opinion and although I might not like fennel for example, other people enjoy it quite a bit.

So nonetheless dinner tonight will be the first recipe in the book, The Kind Diet:

Radicchio Pizza with Truffle Oil

Preparation: easy, took hardly any time at all, very few ingredients (which I thought at first was great but then realized that well, it lacked a few flavors and was too strong in others)

Overall: Didn't really enjoy this pizza but truth is I had never had Raddicchio before, it has a strong flavor but that wasn't too bad. It just didn' taste quite right for me. I also gave some to my boyfriend to try, and well, let's just say it wasn't his cup of tea either.

Hopefully tommorrow's dinner will be yummier...