That’s Not Bland!
The opposite of bland! Photo courtesy of The Food Pornographer

I was asked a question last weekend by a guy I know about how to increase the variety of his diet. The exact words he used in reference to his diet were, if memory serves me right, “bland and boring”. And I’d bet that he’s not the only one with those thoughts on his diet. Variety is probably the most difficult aspect of adopting a new eating pattern because we tend to seize on a few simple meals and eat them over and over. While some of us here enjoy cooking and finding ways to incorporate new tastes, others are more “beginner” in that area. That’s not a bad thing…everyone starts somewhere.

There are actually several aspects to consider when looking to make your meals more pleasurable. Eating is not an experience of only the tastebuds, something that the best chefs recognize. While taste is important, aroma, visual appeal, texture, and temperature also need to be considered. These additional four elements will enhance your enjoyment of a meal and increase your appetite.

Aroma is chiefly influenced by aromatic herbs and spices. Think of walking into a Mexican restaurant and the combination of smells and contrast that with walking into a nice Italian restaurant. Even blindfolded, you’d know where you were by the smells around you. The smells of cumin, garlic, oregano, or basil are distinct and serve to increase your appetite. Visual appeal comes down largely to color in a dish, but presentation plays a part as well. A plate of lettuce is rather boring, but top it with red radishes, orange carrots, purple onions, black olives, and green cucumbers and suddenly it’s eye-catching.

It’s also important to include a variety of textures in a meal and to ensure that each particular food is served at the proper texture. Obviously this will vary based on the eater, but few people want dry meat or mushy vegetables. Learning to cook will go a long way to increasing your eating enjoyment, for instance, not overcooking meat or oversteaming vegetables. And finally, there’s temperature. Have you ever eaten cold eggs? If so, you know that you probably have a preference for how hot certain foods are when you eat them. Also, you probably aren’t going to want a hot bowl of soup in the summertime, nor are you going to want an ice-cold fruit smoothie in the winter. Try to match what you’re eating to the temperature outside.

Having a more exciting diet comes down to variety - variety in ingredients, variety in how things are cooked, variety in flavors. If you eat the same foods prepared the same way day-in and day-out, you will get bored. You may love steak and broccoli, but if you eat a grilled steak and steamed broccoli every single day, you will get bored. Now, I could just say “be sure to include lots of colors and textures” and leave it at that, but you probably already knew that. You’re reading this because you want some ideas. Here are four ways I’ve found to add variety and excitement to one’s diet, in order of increasing value.

1. Condiments and Cooking Sauces
This is the easiest way to change things up. When I started eating better several years back, I literally put hot sauce on everything. I wasn’t too keen on most vegetables, having abused my natural sense of taste with obnoxiously aggressive sweet or salty tastes for years as so many of us do. But with a bit of olive oil and some hot sauce, everything was palatable. Either that or I just couldn’t taste it because my mouth was on fire. The choices here are virtually endless: hot sauce, mustard, soy sauce or tamari, mayonnaise, salsa. There are also less favorable options like ketchup, barbeque sauce, and Worchestershire; these should be using sparingly due to sugar content.

Cooking sauces are much like condiments. They make it easy to change up the flavor of your meals without a great deal of thought or cooking knowledge. Some of the ones that I use occasionally are El Pato, coconut milk, and various sauces from Frontera. Don’t forget spaghetti sauce either; there’s no rule requiring the use of spaghetti sauce with pasta and it works just as well with chicken, beef, vegetables, or spaghetti squash. These also work wonders when you need to put something together fast. Saute meat and vegetables in a skillet and open a can of El Pato: instantly flavorful meal.

2. Herbs and Spices
I have two main issues with using lots of condiments and cooking sauces. First, there’s the salt content. Nearly every one you pick up will have like 7000% of your daily intake of sodium in a 1/2 tsp. Perhaps it’s not that bad, but it’s bad nonetheless. The second issue is that it’s really someone else’s idea of flavor that you’re tasting. That’s fine because you’ll find some that you really enjoy, but it’s rare that two people actually want their food to taste exactly identical. Creating your own herb and spice combinations allows you to get around both problems: you can avoid using salt completely if you want and you can tailor the dish to your liking.

You can give most any dish an ethnic flair with the right combination of herbs and spices. Playing with herbs and spices will really enhance your enjoyment of food. Aside from smelling really good, they complement flavors rather than just masking them as most condiments do. To really enjoy spices though, you have to experiment and that probably means producing some not-so-tasty under- or over-spiced food. Just count it as part of the learning process. There are literally hundreds or thousands of combinations you can try, but you’ll probably find a few spices that you really love. Being a big fan of Mexican-inspired cooking, I go through loads of cumin and garlic. To salads, I add basil, oregano, lemon thyme, cilantro, or any number of other herbs. By changing the spices that you use, you can literally create multiple dishes from the same ingredients.

An added benefit of herbs and spices is that they pack a load of healthful benefits. Check out my article The Spice of Life to learn more.

3. Shop at the Farmer’s Market
The first two points focused mainly on flavor and aroma. Now on to variety in ingredients. When you walk through the produce section of your grocery store, you see a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, right? Or do you? You really don’t. What you’re seeing is the group of fruits and vegetables that are most widely eaten and most resistant to the effects of modern production. Perhaps they’re the most widely eaten because they’ve been bred to be resistant to modern production methods. Regardless, there is a vast range of food that you won’t find in the grocery. For an experience, check out your local farmer’s market (find Farmer’s Markets at Local Harvest).

Your diet will benefit in several ways from going to the Farmer’s Market. First, there will be a bit of forced variety due to seasonality. Broccoli is not a year-round food, nor are apples, blueberries, or Swiss chard. Every week you’ll find something new and you’ll see how the foods available change from spring through to fall and winter. It’s actually rather neat to watch the world of vegetation wax and wane with the seasons and to understand why. Second, there is additional variety of some foods you already eat. Thinking of my local Farmer’s Market, there is one stall that I dubbed “The Radish Guys”. They carry 5 or 6 different kinds of radishes, from the common bland red ones you see at Kroger to potent black cooking radishes that’ll jump up and punch you in the nose. Some booths have Chinese cabbage or rainbow chard or six different varieties of lettuce. You’ll discover local varieties of apples and try some interesting melons beyond the usual watermelon, canteloupe, and honeydew. Don’t be afraid to pick something up and take it home with you (after paying of course). The worst case is that it doesn’t appeal to you and you “wasted” a couple bucks (I would argue that it isn’t really wasted, but that’s getting philosophical). The best case is that you find a new favorite food.

A third benefit is the wealth of knowledge available at the Farmer’s Market and the willingness of people to talk about cooking. I recall going to a booth last year and picking up some odd looking green squash (turned out to be Magda), asking what it was, and walking away with a couple squashes and two or three recipes from several people. The people selling you the food here actually cook and eat it as well, so you can pick up some really interesting tips. Finally, the produce at your Farmer’s Market is probably fresher and more healthful than that in the grocery store given that it’s more likely to be picked within the last day or two and is often cheaper to boot. Just talking to and shaking the hand of the person growing your food is nice, adding a bit of human element to eating.

4. Join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program
Joining a CSA could be the ultimate in introducing variety to your diet for one very simple reason: you have no choice. You pay for and receive a box of produce every week, selected by the farmer. One week, it may be cucumbers, avocados, spinach, and blueberries and the next week it could be kohlrabi, sweet potatoes, and onions (probably not due to seasonality, but you get the point). You’re going to open your box every week and find something new depending on what is in season in your area. And when you come across something that you’ve never used before, you’ll scramble to Google to find a recipe for it or talk to some other foodies in your area to figure out how to use it. This is forced variety, “forced” being a positive thing in this case. A year of CSA surprises will probably introduce you to more variety than you could do yourself simply because we all tend to get into patterns. Check the Local Harvest link above to find CSAs.

What other methods do you all have of incorporating variety into your diet?


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