{"id":30463,"date":"2021-01-04T00:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T00:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/?p=30463"},"modified":"2021-01-17T11:36:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T11:36:05","slug":"foreboding-foods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/foreboding-foods\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreboding Foods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking about the history of food sometimes freaks me out and I go down a bit of a rabbit hole. Some things, like an apple, are just plain meant to be eaten: thin skin, plump, juicy looking\u2026 who wouldn\u2019t smack their lips and take a big ol\u2019 bite out of an apple? Other things seem like they took some more ingenuity to figure out\u2026 that or an abiding belief that anything \u2013 anything<\/em> \u2013 can be eaten if you just try hard enough.<\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019m just kind of ignoring the centuries of culinary experimentation that went into discovering how delicious certain fruits and vegetables are, but just at face value \u2013 who looks at these things and thinks: yep, edible!<\/p>\n

Artichokes<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

This was the thought that struck me the other day when I was eating marinated artichoke hearts that my mother made from scratch (humblebrag). It got me thinking: who looked at that spiny, bulbous, floral plant that looks like Audrey<\/a> from Little Shop of Horrors<\/em> and decided, \u201cThis \u2013 this is going to be something delicious\u2026 but only once it is <\/em>cooked for a specific time period<\/em><\/a>, after all the leaves have been first chopped, then scraped clean with one\u2019s teeth, and then the middle of it is drenched in olive oil, salt, pepper, and spices.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"recipe-vegan-artichoke-soup\"<\/td>\n\n

Check out this Creamy Artichoke soup<\/a>\u00a0recipe<\/h4>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
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 <\/p>\n

Prickly Pears<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe it was some hallucinating cowboy or lost explorer who was dragging his way through the rocky, baked landscapes of Arizona, Mexico, or Nevada who blearily made the decision to try to chop off the swollen, red tip of a cactus<\/a> and try eating it \u2013 because chowing down on a cactus certainly doesn\u2019t seem like a particularly rational decision. Not that I\u2019m complaining, of course, prickly pears aren\u2019t just delicious, but they\u2019re also used for all sorts of different things<\/a> like biofuel, plastics, animal fodder, and dyes.<\/p>\n

Durian<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be completely fair to the people who enjoy durians, I have never eaten it, but I have heard of its existence and \u2013 my god<\/em> \u2013 it sounds like a nightmare. Not only does a durian have an outer shell<\/a> that is as sharp and spiny as an iron maiden<\/a>, but apparently it smells horrible. <\/em>\u201cLike turpentine and onions garnished with a gym sock\u201d is how actual scientists<\/em><\/a> describe how it smells \u2013 with all of the odds stacked against the durian, it\u2019s a wonder that anyone even attempted to eat it, much less got through the process without hurling.<\/p>\n

Pineapple<\/strong><\/p>\n

Okay, pineapples don\u2019t take much work to get to the good stuff \u2013 but just on face value: intimidating<\/em>. They\u2019re freaky looking<\/a>. If you gave someone a pineapple who had never seen one before, wouldn\u2019t they think it looks like a weapon? A pineapple has enough spikes on it that Peter Jackson could have put it on the end of the Witch-King\u2019s mace<\/a> in Return of the King<\/em> and it wouldn\u2019t look any less imposing (y\u2019all thought I couldn\u2019t get another Lord of the Rings<\/em> reference<\/a> into my blogs about vegetables but look who\u2019s laughing now, hobbits).<\/p>\n

Root Vegetables<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m just going for a catch-all here \u2013 as you know, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and pretty much anything that you can pull out of the earth and cook are veggies that I dig (pun intended). However, I very much think it is weird<\/em> that human beings looked at what would have amounted to a dirty old root and thought that they would be fine to eat? It\u2019s covered in dirt!<\/p>\n

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\"Recipe-Creamy-Vegan-Parsnip-Carrot-Butternut-Squash-Sweet-Potato-Soup\"<\/a><\/td>\n\n

Check out this Creamy Vegan Parsnip, Carrot soup<\/a>\u00a0recipe<\/h4>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
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Dragon Fruit<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I never have an opportunity to talk about dragon fruit, so here\u2019s my shot. I\u2019ll never understand the process that went into deciding that eating what is essentially an anime fireball<\/a> that\u2019s filled with what looks like gravelly snow<\/a>, but my goodness do I thank them for doing the hard work in discovering one of the most delicious fruits on the whole planet.<\/p>\n

So\u2026what else do you wonder about? The guy who first milked a cow? Let me know!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anything \u2013 can be eaten if you just try hard enough, says Simply Souperlicious’ Tayla Blaire. She takes a closer look at foreboding fruits. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":34068,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_aioseo_title":"","_aioseo_description":"Anything \u2013 can be eaten if you just try hard enough, says Simply Souperlicious' Tayla Blaire. She takes a closer look at foreboding fruits. ","content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[173,51,267,502,387,158,503,384,395,495,388],"class_list":["post-30463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soup_and_soul","tag-artichoke","tag-carrot","tag-dragon-fruit","tag-durian","tag-food-confessions","tag-parsnip","tag-prickly-pear","tag-soup-and-soul","tag-soupsoul","tag-tayla-blaire","tag-veggie-confession"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simplysouperlicious.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}