The Lazy Genius Podcast - #108 - Food in a Bowl: Flavors

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

In part two of our Food in a Bowl series, we’re talking about flavors. There are so many ways to put together flavors because flavor options are literally endless. And that’s a little bit of why it’s hard, right? When we have so many options, it feels overwhelming and we just give up. In today’s episode, we’re going to distill flavor down a bit to help you think through how to put together your own dinner bowl. Stuff Mentioned If you missed the first part in this series, listen to Food in a Bowl: Basics. The Flavor Bible is my most treasured book in my kitchen. I don’t say that lightly, y’all. Join me live on Instagram around 12:15 p.m. EST on Thursday to chat about food bowl engines and destinations. If Facebook is your kind of thing, we’ve got a Lazy Genius community over there. Join us and make some friends. Download a transcript of this episode! This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's the Volkswagen Taos. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Taos is fit for everyday life. Nimble in traffic, agile and tight spots, and still spacious enough for weekend getaways. While available 4-motion all-wheel drive gives confidence in rain and snow. The capable Taos, you deserve more confidence. Visit VW.ca to learn more. S-UVW, German engineered for all. Hi friends. You're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is part two of our food in a bowl series. Last week we talked about food in a bowl basics, how you need contrast more than anything else. And you build that contrast using four dinner bowl building blocks, base, protein, toppings, and sauce. If you miss that episode, definitely.

definitely listen to it before you listen to this one. And today in part two, we're talking about flavors. There are so many ways to put together flavors because flavor options are like literally endless. And that's a little bit of why it's hard, right? When we have so many options, it feels overwhelming and we just kind of give up, not just with dinner bowls, with many things in life, right? So today we're going to distill flavor down a bit to help you think through how to put together your own dinner bowl. Okay, so to pare down the options for a dinner bowl, it's helpful to start with two things.

An engine and a destination. Your engine is the one choice you know you're definitely using. It's like something you already have in your house that you want to use. Maybe it's fresh produce from a generous neighbor's garden or it's meat that was on sale that you need to cook. Your engine can be any of the four building blocks, base protein toppings or sauce, but making one set decision for your bowl, it makes the other choices easier. You just need something that's already there that can drive the rest of the decisions,

like an engine drives things. I understand cars very well. And the other thing that's helpful is your destination. I think the best way to frame a destination is by cuisine. So let's say your engine is a rotisserie chicken that was on sale, but where are you going with it? It's Japanese, Tex-Mex, Italian, Thai. So a cuisine can be your destination. Or you can use an already existing dish as a destination inspiration for your dinner bowl, cheeseburgers, barbecue chicken pizza, California rolls, beef stew, fish tacos. You can use a dish that's technically not a dinner bowl, but use it as your destination to kind of build your dinner bowl with that dishes

flavors as the inspiration. Does that make sense? So when you have your engine, that one ingredient you're already planning to use no matter what and your destination, which helps you limit your flavor options, you're 80% of the way there to building your bowl. We are going to practically build some bowls at the end of this episode using the engine destination model. But for now, let's talk about some destination options. More specifically, what ingredients go together when you think of certain cuisines. Now, before I give you flavor combos, you know what I'm going to mention, right? Yes, the flavor Bible. We're going to talk about the flavor Bible. The flavor Bible is my most treasured book in my kitchen. It's a literal encyclopedia of what ingredients go together. And it is my favorite.

The binding is starting to get sad because I use it so often. I use it almost. I use it almost. almost every day. It's such a great place to start when building bowls because you can get topping ideas so easily. So if this way of eating, it seems like you're seen or you just want to become better at riffing on recipes and throwing stuff together with what you have, this book is essential, truly. If you have basic cooking skills, like how to roast and saute and grill, a couple of which I have episodes on, by the way, you can put anything together, use a the flavor Bible. Okay, so let's talk about what foods go together. If you don't have the flavor Bible and you aren't going to look it up, or you just want to quickly think about what ingredient combinations

you might have without having to check a resource. A great way is honestly to think about restaurant meals. When you go to your favorite Mexican restaurant, what ingredients are in a lot of things? Halipinos and other chilies and peppers. tomatoes, avocado, beans, tortillas, queso fresco, cilantro, onions, and then spices and flavors like chili powder and cumin and lime. You can imagine a restaurant menu or even just pay attention the next time you go to a restaurant and see when ingredients are used often. That means that they go together well to create a unique flavor. If you think about it, different cuisines from different countries are based on common cooking techniques and a limited number of ingredients used in many

ways. In America, most of us are spoiled because we can get any ingredient anytime. But if you live in Tokyo, sure, you have access to variety for sure, but you're on the sea. So, there's a lot of fish and other seafood. Japanese food has a lot of seaweed in it. Not because they love seaweed, but because ancient Japanese people had to eat what they had and they had a lot of seaweed. And now it's traditional. Rice grows well in the wet landscape by the ocean as do soybeans that are the bases for tofu. The Japanese culture traditionally is also very patient. I know this because I am married to a Japanese man and have Japanese in-laws. So, like, they have a lot of big flavor ingredients that take a long time to create,

like months to create, things like soy sauce and Benito flakes, which are, like, basically little pieces of dried fish. Don't ever think it. It's fine. My in-laws are Japanese, and so I just have a lot of exposure to these particular ingredients, and they are amazing. But it's funny. The food is really, it's kind of limited and really simple.

Japanese cuisine was built on the foods that they had access to, and people were just creative with all the ways to use what they had. And that is true of so many cuisines. You're not going to find a whole lot of cuisines that have a million different flavor and ingredient options. They have what they have. All right. So let's go back to the Mexican restaurant, and we're going to look at the same thing. Jim Gaffigan, he had a joke years ago about how every dish at a Mexican restaurant is meat, beans, cheese, and a tortilla. Kind of like, yeah, it's true, but in like a million different ways. And so I want you to think about how these ingredients are, it's like the same ingredients,

but they're used in multiple ways. For example, jalapeno peppers. Halapeno peppers are a great ingredient to have in your dinner bowl with a Mexican-inspired destination. you could chop up raw jalapeno, easy, done. You could also buy or make, if you wanted to, pickled jalapinos, it's a different flavor and texture, but still very complementary to Mexican flavors.

There are also smoked jalapinos called Chipotle peppers, which are spicy and smoky and amazing. You could even throw a couple of jalapinos on the grill when you're grilling your steak or your chicken to add a different kind of smoky flavor and a softer texture to that jalapeno when it's grilled. So the ingredients for many cuisines are fairly limited, but you can be creative in how you prepare them and how they fit into your four dinner bowl building blocks, base protein, toppings, and sauce.

You don't always have to use, like, for example, with black beans. You don't have to use, like, plain heated up black beans on your Mexican dinner bowl. You can change up how you use it, all right? You can mash them together with some sour cream and lime juice. almost like refried beans that aren't refried, like kind of like bean dip. You can throw them in a skillet with oil and sliced onion to get like a little bit of crisp on them.

So you can use a basic list of ingredients. Don't feel limited necessarily in a bad way by a basic list of ingredients. It's actually super, super helpful. And remember that you have options of how you use those ingredients, how they're cooked and what they go with. All right. So let's break down a few cuisine destinations

to help you think about ingredients that go together. And then you can have some options on what to do with those ingredients as you build your bowl. I'd say we'll start with Asian, but just saying Asian feels so unfair because Asia is enormous. The differences in different cuisines like Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Indian, they are huge, right? But you don't have to let that stop you. You're not offending an entire people group by using green salsa on a Korean bowl. As long as you're using ingredients that generally go together, together and offer the contrast, your dinner bowl is going to be great. So we're going to plow through

a few list of flavors inspired by different cuisines. But we're not going to say just Asian, because it's too big. I did already say Japanese. So I'm just going to start there really quickly. So rice and noodles are the perfect base for a Japanese bowl. Fish is a great protein, chicken and beef are great too, of course. For toppings, you might use raw radish, green onion, ginger for sure. whether it's like used in a marinade on the meat or it's pickled or it's just like grated on top which is super traditional to do in Japanese food. Anything pickled, oh my gosh, Japanese people love them some pickles and then greens. And he's sort of like, yeah, like leafy greens. Now in terms of sauces or flavors, soy sauce is plenty. Like you could just use soy sauce and be fine. You could also

use dashi, which is a Japanese stock. It's made from kelp, which is, you know, like seaweed. And it's actually super, super delicious. If you've ever had miso soup, sometimes there's dashi in that or in a lot of like brothy Japanese soups, it's really, really quite delicious. But, you know, don't freak, you don't have to use it. It's fine. Mirren is a great ingredient. It is sweet. You can get that in like the Asian food aisle at Target. And then, It's like what you could use instead of sugar and it's, it's just got a really great flavor. I use it in like all my Japanese marinate. Ponzu, which is citrusy.

That's another thing that you could have as a staple. Sesame seeds or sesame oil for like that rich umami kind of flavor sesame seed. The taste of sesame goes really far. It's really strong. So you don't have to use a lot. And then wasabi, which is like a heat, but it's like a fresh heat. It's like it's Japanese horse radish basically. So let's say really high quality salmon is on sale at Whole Foods and I jump on it and I want to cook it that night.

I'm only going to buy a couple of salmon steaks to keep the cost down since this is a bowl. Not everybody needs their own piece of salmon. Salmon is my engine and it's my protein right and my building block. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habiniero?

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of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now, a perfect base for a Japanese bowl, especially with salmon as the protein, is rice. White rice and salmon, you guys, they are magical. together. I cannot even tell you. P.S., I'm going to offer some rice thoughts next week in the Hacks and How To's episode, but I just need to say that I'm married to a Japanese man. We take our rice really, really seriously. I buy enormous bags of high quality rice at the Asian grocery store every couple of months, and I have a rice cooker that legit does not have English words on it.

And I love it. I'm never going to go back to other kinds of white rice again. Now, I'm not saying that you can't, but I don't make rice on the stove anymore. or have rice in like the Uncle Ben's style, like where it's loose, loose grains, because we like it's sticky and short-grained and amazing. So I will offer what tips I can next week, but I feel like that's an important thing to mention today. I'm a rice knob. There you go. Okay, so we have got, so rice is the base, salmon as the protein. There's no seasonings yet, right? We've just got some, you know, toothsome texture. How do you describe the texture of rice? And it's, you know, like, it's just rice. It's like the mildest flavor ever. And then like tender, really fatty, slightly sweet

salmon. It's also great if you imagine the color is really good because you've got the white and that contrasting deep pink. So the bowl is already pretty. Now, as you decide what goes next, toppings or sauce, think about what you already have or already know. You might have like a great salty ginger dressing that would be a perfect sauce, which frees you up. That's taken care of, right? You can take a few minutes to saute up some spinach or scallions with that. Maybe you want to finally play around with those bottles of Asian ingredients, and you do make a sauce, and so your toppings will be simpler, okay?

You're not going to, like, cook a whole lot of things. So here are a couple of ways to finish out the bowl. You could do rice, salmon, spinach that's sauteed in soy sauce. and ginger, crunchy, fresh green onions, and then a drizzle of yum, my beloved yum yum sauce, which you can buy in a lot of different regular grocery stores. Another bowl would be the rice, the salmon, fresh cucumber, avocado, and a soy sesame kind of dressing, almost like a salmon roll. Salmon rice bowls are a thing of the U.T. So if you haven't tried it yet, I just encourage you to give that combination of whirl. Just start with salmon and rice and see what happens. Okay, that was a longer one.

We're going to speed up and get through some more. Okay, if Thai food is your destination, here are some ingredients to pull from, Thai basil, chili peppers and bell peppers, cilantro, coconut, coconut milk, coconut water, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, lime, mint, and peanuts. Those are like the main Thai flavors. Also, rice, of course. and then a variety of proteins and vegetables. You can sort of pick what you like. So let's say you have rotissory chicken as your engine and tie as your destination. You put the chicken over brown rice or tie noodles. You're going to saute some really colorful bell peppers along with a little halapeno for heat until they're like a little charred. You don't move them around in the pan. Let them kind of get charred

on the edges. And they've still got a bite to them. They're not like super duper soft. You're going to layer that on the rice and the chicken. And then in that same skillet that you just sauteed the vegetables, saute those peppers, you're going to stir in some garlic and ginger and coconut milk. And you're going to let it bubble together a little to thicken up. And then you're going to put a squeeze of lime in there to finish because you need that acid. And then you pour that over the bowl for the sauce. And then you're going to top it with chopped cilantro and peanuts. You guys, that sounds so dang good.

Again, we're going to talk about the logistics of how all this happens next week. Notice, though, we just used one pan. You know, you make a sauce and the pan that you made your vegetables in. but for now, just get inspired by those flavors. Okay, how about a Greek destination? I want you to remember to think about restaurants too, right? Imagine how those ingredients show up in restaurants. So your ingredient list would be, you know, fresh herbs, so many fresh herbs,

like basil, parsley, mint, feta cheese, garlic, honey, lamb, lemon, olive oil, oregano, peppers and onions, tomatoes, zucchini, rice, yogurt, and pita bread. Those are all over the place and a ton of Greek dishes that you see. So this could be great with a rice base, but let's say you really don't want to do rice. So let's do a base of like roasted vegetables. Okay. Eggplant, peppers, and onions are roasted until they're charred and also a little soft. So that's your base. So on top you could do rotissory chicken. Easy. You could do some quick grilled shrimp if you wanted to do like lamb meatballs. You're going to do that. Your toppings are easy. Chopped cucumber and tomato, maybe some olives,

and your sauce is yogurt mixed with lemon juice, garlic, and salt, and any fresh herbs you have around. Delicious. Done. For you adventurous folks who are tired of everything being Asian or Tex-Mex, what about like North African, like Moroccan food? That food is delicious. So your list would be chickpeas, cuss-cus, mint, lamb, tomatoes, cucumbers, rice, garlic, cumin, and bell peppers. Those are all over the place in Moroccan food. So your bowl could be a base of cuscus, right? You just cook it plain. Your protein could actually include your sauce. Like, that's another thing too, is if you, like, saute your meat and then kind of simmer it a little bit in a sauce. So you could like saute ground lamb until it's crispy and cooked

and then add to that chickpeas, garlic, cumin, and a can of diced tomatoes. Okay? So it's saucy and spicy and everything is talking to each other. And you just put that on top of your cuscoos and then you top it with like fresh crunchy cucumbers and tomatoes and some fresh mint. I'm so hungry right now. This is a mistake to do before lunchtime. Okay, so we're going to stop there because I don't want you to get too overwhelmed with like

all the cuisines ever. Here's your hack though to build a bowl with great flavors. have a destination. Now, it'll often be a cuisine, just because that's like an easy limit, but it can also be an actual dish that inspired the bowl. Now, we didn't do one of those, so let's do one really quick. So you might have, you might have had like a Bonnese sandwich before. They are so good. It's on a special kind of Vietnamese baguette. P.S., Vietnam has a lot of French influence because of, like, colonization and all that stuff. So this is a baguette riff. And it sometimes even has patte on it, which is French and hilarious and awesome.

Again, cuisines come from what's there in the country or what's brought into the country. So it's, to me, that's just kind of a fascinating, simple way of looking at it. Like, these are just the ingredients that these people have and they have to figure out how to use them. I just think that's really cool. So a bon me, it's on a light, crunchy baguette. It's usually chicken or roasted pork. It's slathered with mayonnaise or even the patte, which offers like, a creamy contrast to everything else in the sandwich, a lot of crusty things.

And in the sandwich, you've got jalapeno, fresh cilantro, and other herbs, and then a ton of pickled vegetables. Now, do you see how you can easily make a Bonmead dinner bowl? Make a base of rice, or even like cubed up, toasted leftover baguette, like bale croutons or something if you wanted to. Ground pork or rotissory chicken for your protein. It's fine that it's just seasoned with salt and pepper. Like, it doesn't, that's fine. Your toppings are going to be. fresh cucumber, jalapeno, pickled carrots and onions, and fresh cilantro, and then just thin out some mayonnaise with like a little lime juice. And then if you want like a kick of some heat, which I highly recommend, you could put in some saraccio or some hot sauce and mix that up

together and drizzle that on top. Amazing. It was so good. Okay. Now we'll stop. So you need a destination to help you narrow down your flavor options. And it helps to have an engine. One building block that you know is already set. If you need ideas on how to find out what ingredients go together, use already existing dishes as inspiration, think about what is served at your favorite ethnic restaurants, you could Google ingredients in Chinese food or get the flavor Bible. Not only does it tell you what ingredients go together, like everything that goes with corn or black eyed peas, but it has cuisine lists too. Where do you think I learned a lot of this stuff? So in case you are curious and you're like, is it really worth the investment? Should I do it?

These are all the cuisines that are listed in the flavor Bible. I gathered them all. This is the complete list. And they all have, like, you look up the cuisine and it lists the ingredients for you that go with that cuisine. All right, hold tight. Are you ready for this? You're not ready for this. Afghan, African, three kinds, North, South and West African food. Australian. Austrian, Brazilian, Brazilian, Canadian, Chilean, Chinese, Creole, Cuban, Eastern European, English. Yes, that list has peas and mutton on it, which is amazing. Ethiopian, French, several regions in France, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indian, Indonesian, Iranian, Italian, also several regions for that one. Japanese, Korean, Latin American, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Moralian.

Moroccan, Portuguese, Russian, Scandinavian, Southeast Asian, Southern, like the American South, American Southwestern, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese. And seen. This book is amazing, like, truly. And if you look at Eastern European ingredients and you think, cool, but what goes with like caraway seeds and juniper berries when you look at that list, like, you just flip to the list in the flavor Bible for caraway seeds? and juniper berries. Now, I don't care for either of those things, and you're not likely going to use that as an example, but that's the power of this book. Like, you can find matches for literally anything if you wanted to. It's so, so great. So obviously, I'm going to put a link to the

flavor Bible in the show notes, or you can just click the link in the info section on your podcast app. I love it more than any book in my kitchen. Truly, it is a treasure. And so are dinner bowls. So I hope this episode is giving you some inspiration on how to build your own. Don't be overwhelmed by the fact that there are more flavors than a person can try in a lifetime. Just enjoy what you have and take the pressure off of every bowl being perfect. That's not how cooking works. You just try something and see if you like it. But start with what you have and know.

The other day, I was making a dinner bowl and I just had a bunch of random leftovers, but I didn't really have a good protein. I had rice and I had some like my standard like cucumber and cream. onion and avocado and a couple things. But I didn't have a protein and I didn't have a destination. And so what I ended up doing for my protein is I had some hard-bolled eggs and I chop those up and put them on the rice. And it's already a little bit problematic because I didn't know where I was going. And I was like, well, I need something salty, I guess. And so I had some bacon, like cooked bacon in the freezer that I like heated up in the microwave really fast and crumbled it on top.

And then I put cucumber and tomato. green onion and avocado and cilantro. I like threw everything on there. And then I was like, well, what sauce is this? I don't even know where I'm going. And I put on, I think I probably put on yummy yum sauce because like what else was I going to do? Or maybe I use Greek dressing. I don't even remember exactly, but I do remember when I ate it. I was like, this isn't, this isn't my best. This isn't my best work. And it's because I didn't, I didn't pick a destination. But you know what? It also wasn't bad. And it was fine. And it was lunch that wasn't. sandwich crusts. So I'm just saying, like, don't put so much pressure on it. Like, it's even a,

even like a not great dinner bowl or lunch bowl is like still pretty good. Okay. So that's it for today. Next week, we're going to talk about hacks and how tos to make the logistics of a dinner bowl actually work in your house as well as talking about like that whole picky kid situation. And until then, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra and I'll see you next time. You ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life?

Because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you.