Top Ten: Food

My favorite top ten subject! It is said the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. It's a shame that such great home cooking was unappreciated as a child. I always wanted fast food. Now I can't stand fast food, at least in America where everything from cheese to onion rings are sweetened to make them more alluring to children.

I've been exploring nutrition and cooking ever since I had children of my own. First, for their sake, now for a true love of the science and art of food.

• Savory Cheesecake. I want to start of with this one as something I discovered before I even realized their was a difference between good food created by someone who cared for their craft and garbage pushed out as cheaply and quickly as possible. I was stationed in Germany and my girlfriend bought a wedge of cheesecake and some bread from a roving bakery truck, knowing that I enjoyed both of those foods. The cheesecake was the best I ever ate. I have looked hard for something as good in America, even trying expensive specialty shops. No one seems to make cheesecake as well as a Germany bakery.
• Rib-eye. I don't go much for meat in my diet. Deli sandwiches, Thanksgiving turkeys, baked ham, I could do without them all. But I cannot resist even the smell of a charbroiled rib-eye. Just the right balance of meat and fat, the taste is irresistible. I might happily forgo sirloin for a salad, but I would beg for a rib-eye!
• Lobster. Well, add all those cretaceous arthropods. Crabs, shrimp, crayfish even. If you can keep from cooking them into rubber, the taste and texture are delicious and they are quite healthy for you.
• Oranges. As a juice, a snack, made into a sauce or as part of a strict diet, oranges are manna from heaven!
• Apple Cider. Apples are amazing. Their fruit, their trees, their biology, their history, their taste! The most iconic apple taste, for me, is apple cider.
• Fresh Home Made Bread. For comfort food, nothing hits the spot like bread. I've eaten breads from all over the world and I love them all. My favorite, I think, is probably the flat bread I ate in Turkey.
• Corn. Thank you natives of the Americas for this treasure! Boiled, steamed or grilled on the ear. Cut of the ear as kernels. Creamed. Ground into cornmeal and eaten as porrige, cornbread, cakes. Or, if your not hungry, made into medicine, fuel, or used as fodder.
• Artichoke. Who looked at a thistle and said "I want to eat that."? Give that guy a medal. High faluten food. You might not think of eating it with fried chicken, but it is yummy no matter what else you are eating.
• Cheese and Butter. A good deal of fat and a great deal of yummy.
• Dates. These are so delicious that I don't understand why they are not everywhere in the U.S. I specially enjoy dates stuffed with pecans or walnuts.
• Mushrooms. I called oranges 'manna from heaven' but historically mushrooms carried that moniker. Some people have an aversion to them and I suspect that is from corporate advertising. There is a financial interest to convincing people that the most abundant food available to them free might be toxic and they should only pay for one or two varieties and forgo all the rest.

Now I am really hungry! It was hard to limit my list. Onions, garlic and peppercorns find their way into just about everything I cook. Snow peas, carrots, pears and pineapples can be found in my kitchen all year long. I like to keep meals simple, four or so items at the most. But each meal features different stars.