Stepping out of your comfort zone

Well, the Coronavirus has just catapulted pretty much every human being on the planet out of their comfort zone. It is becoming increasingly difficult to think about anything else. However, I feel we must try. To strike a balance I have started listening to classical music on the radio rather than constant news… much more relaxing.

In my recent post “15 (food-related) things to do rather than worrying about Coronavirus” I suggested we might try to push ourselves to try some slightly different foods outside of our usual buying pattern. For Tina, she has bought some tinned jackfruit and was talking about making a chilli with it. I have never tried jackfruit so am really looking forward to hearing about how she got on with this. I, on the other hand, purchased walnut halves, passion fruit and organic maca powder.

Firstly, the walnut halves, £1.50 for 100g in Tesco’s. I have never really liked nuts although I am not allergic to them or anything. I quite like salted peanuts and soft cashew nuts but that’s about it. I wanted to try walnuts again as they are really, really good for you. I can now confirm that I still do not like them very much; this is disappointing. They taste err, too nutty for me I suppose, and they dry your mouth out a bit but not in a nice way like rhubarb or spinach but in a sort of furry way. I have eaten a pathetic little morsel of one half of a walnut. I will try to eat one or two more, but I doubt if I will be buying these again.

Next came the organic maca powder. I had never even heard of this before I bought it. £4.00 for 125g in Tesco’s. Supposedly a Peruvian superfood high in riboflavin, iron, calcium, zinc and fibre. It sounded like it was going to give me a real energy boost. A google search revealed this comes from a root-like plant, a relative of the radish family. My search also revealed I had unknowingly just purchased a substance well known to increase your fertility, sex drive and may enhance your breast size!! Mmm, I may have got more than I bargained for here…

I tried a teaspoonful sprinkled on my breakfast cereal. It tasted nutty which was OK but also sweet, which after a while got a bit sickly. The powder in the milk also didn’t completely dissolve so the milk wasn’t a smooth texture any more and the more I ate the less I liked it. I would try this again, partly because I parted with a whole hard earned £4. for it, but maybe sprinkled in a cake or something like banana bread, I think that might work better.

Last but not least, the passion fruit. I am sure I have had passion fruit previously in desserts or cocktails but I had never bought it or prepared it myself. This cost £1.25 for 3 in Tesco’s. I prepared it as per the packet instructions to slice lengthways and to scoop out the seeds and orange flesh to eat. Passion fruit are highly rich in Vitamin C so worth a try when all the shops are sold out of effervescent Vitamin C at the moment. The juice was sweet but sharp, I thought it was very tasty. The seeds however were a bit too crunchy, exploding uncomfortably under my teeth, so I tried to pulverise them with my pestle and mortar but this was not very successful with all the squidgy juice around. I was a little miffed how little there is to actually eat inside this fruit, but what there is is flavoursome. I think tonight I will try to blitz in my mini chopping machine the last 2 passion fruits to try to make a sort of passion fruit sauce and will serve this with vanilla ice cream. Wish me luck, could be smiles or tears!

I did enjoy the experiment of the new food shopping although none of the results were a knockout for me. I aspire to keep an open mind about food and will do this again some time. My book club friends can attest that after 5 years I have almost eaten the entire menu of The White Hart in Holyport. Not in one sitting I might add, but each monthly meeting I try something different, which has been fun to do. I particularly enjoyed the chilli prawn linguine and the vegetable lasagne, but all the food in The White Hart is good.

For today I have run out of time, but on the subject of stepping out of your comfort zone this has reminded me of a nice story I once wrote on this theme. I will share this with you in a separate post in the next couple of days and you can tell me if you like (or not) my “proper” writing as opposed to my blog-a-log chatting. Watch this space xx