It's the small things that bring joy
Nov. 29th, 2023 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resoluteSo, over the last year, I have largely lost my sense of taste.
Now, my sense of smell has never been that good, which has been a bit mixed but mostly positive over my lifetime. I have noticed that people with a really good sense of smell tend to suffer more than I do from smell overload. But over the last 1-2 years, something in my repeated surgery schedule has just fucked it all up. Is it anesthesia? Is it some medication or another? Is it the trauma and scarring? Something else? Who the hell knows. But the upshot is, I can basically taste the Main Five - salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami - but almost nothing else. I can't smell it, and I can't taste it.
It is difficult to want to eat things when they take effort/money/time to prepare or acquire, and then they taste like nothing good. (Not to mention that after my epiglottis was removed I had to re-learn to swallow, and it works about 19/20 times. Every so often I choke on my own spit, or on water, or rice, or whatever it was I tried to eat without paying sufficient attention to what my throat muscles were doing.)
Eating is not very rewarding, is what I am saying, relative to the work it requires.
So, over the last year or so I have shifted to preferring foods whose taste profile lies largely in one of the Five. Lots of citrus flavors. Lots of salt, but I have to really keep that in moderation. Lots of miso. Lots of spice.
I have always liked spicy foods. But now I have gravitated to eating almost exclusively from a rotating cast of foods from or inspired by the cuisines of Mexico, India, Thailand, Szechuan, and now Korea.
And I have discovered gochugaru.
This is bringing me joy.
I am putting on rice, on eggs, on tofu, I am making fresh kimchi, I am putting it in soups -- just, this is so great.
I have yet another way of making food TASTE, and it is a small thing (literally, I have just a small jar of gochugaru, but I expect to be buying more,) but it brings me joy.
Now, my sense of smell has never been that good, which has been a bit mixed but mostly positive over my lifetime. I have noticed that people with a really good sense of smell tend to suffer more than I do from smell overload. But over the last 1-2 years, something in my repeated surgery schedule has just fucked it all up. Is it anesthesia? Is it some medication or another? Is it the trauma and scarring? Something else? Who the hell knows. But the upshot is, I can basically taste the Main Five - salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami - but almost nothing else. I can't smell it, and I can't taste it.
It is difficult to want to eat things when they take effort/money/time to prepare or acquire, and then they taste like nothing good. (Not to mention that after my epiglottis was removed I had to re-learn to swallow, and it works about 19/20 times. Every so often I choke on my own spit, or on water, or rice, or whatever it was I tried to eat without paying sufficient attention to what my throat muscles were doing.)
Eating is not very rewarding, is what I am saying, relative to the work it requires.
So, over the last year or so I have shifted to preferring foods whose taste profile lies largely in one of the Five. Lots of citrus flavors. Lots of salt, but I have to really keep that in moderation. Lots of miso. Lots of spice.
I have always liked spicy foods. But now I have gravitated to eating almost exclusively from a rotating cast of foods from or inspired by the cuisines of Mexico, India, Thailand, Szechuan, and now Korea.
And I have discovered gochugaru.
This is bringing me joy.
I am putting on rice, on eggs, on tofu, I am making fresh kimchi, I am putting it in soups -- just, this is so great.
I have yet another way of making food TASTE, and it is a small thing (literally, I have just a small jar of gochugaru, but I expect to be buying more,) but it brings me joy.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-29 05:11 pm (UTC)Thank you also for sharing. Will have to see if the big Chinese plus supermarket twenty minutes away sells it.
Have you tried Shichimi Togarashi? When I had a little tube of it, I sprinkled loads over whatever I was eating.
What a great find
Date: 2023-11-29 06:47 pm (UTC)I'm super cautious around hot peppers, but recently learned I could tolerate around 1/4 tsp of ancho pepper in a two-serving dish. It's lovely to get some new tastes for my old buds.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-29 08:00 pm (UTC)I've also got gochujang, but I failed to understand the symbology of how hot a particular tub of it is and mine is WAY HOT. It's also like fruit leather rather than a paste, so I'm thinking of trying again. It has a fermented element, so you've probably ruled it out already. But that makes the gochugaru all the more amazing.
P.