The Cocoanut

The pasta layers were thick and dry at the edges, not at all the silky tender sheets I’d expected. The bolognaise sauce was dry and severely lacking in tomato flavor. The béchamel sauce, which I’d hoped would be the star of the dish turned out bland and tasted thoroughly of flour. If flour could be made into a cream-like consistency, it would taste like my hideous béchamel sauce. Even the fresh parsley was overpowering, its herbal airiness aggressively punching through the awkward tag-team combo of Bland Bechamel and the Bolognaise from Hell.

To cleanse my mouth of the aftertaste of what could very well be the most tragically unappetizing lasagna in the southern hemisphere, I rushed to the pantry, a humongous floor-to-ceiling dietary first-aid kit, and got myself a bar of chocolate I saved for emergency situations such as this one. My cooking skills may be questionable, but I can take comfort in the fact that, at least for now, my shopping skills remain intact.

The rapidly burgeoning gourmet food industry is one obvious example of how the trading up phenomenon is gaining ground among consumers. I remember being quite enchanted walking along the aisles admiring the beautifully packaged food and ingredients on display. However, I find that the more I cook, the less interested I am in these gourmet offerings, opting instead for the more-bang-for-my-buck philosophy of home cooking.

What went wrong? Have I become old or am I just poorer? Well, although both of those options are quite accurate, I think the real reason for this disinterest is that these cute gourmet items, kept in small packaging to increase profit margins, are not very practical for the home cook. They may be invaluable for the hobby cook for whom cooking is an indulgent pleasure, but for the home cook whose daily sustenance depends on him cooking, these items are at best, nice to look at, and not much else.

I’ve got nothing against clever marketers. I admire their tenacity in studying our spending habits and emotional levels to create those products we never knew we wanted. Nonetheless, I can’t help but harbour a sense of mistrust towards the marketers, and over the years I’ve developed a hobby of outsmarting the marketers by doing the exact opposite of what they predict I would do.

So instead of buying a bottle of dukkah-infused extra virgin olive oil, which apparently is quite essential to the modern kitchen, I instead walk across the street to Mediterranean Wholesalers on Sydney Road, hardly a bastion of fashionable shopping, and got myself the cheapest bottle of olive oil. Cheap olive oil? Are you sure? Well it looks like extra virgin olive oil, it smells like extra virgin olive oil, and it tastes like extra virgin olive oil, so it must be extra virgin olive oil, right?

I once stumbled upon an article by a prominent foodie who suggested olive oil is a bit like wine, with different tastes and nuances to suit different food, and that we should all stock a few different types of olive oil at home. At the supermarket, there are olive oils that are marketed as best suited for seafood, vegetables, stir fries, meat and pasta. Are we really supposed to get all these different types of olive oil for each dish? I doubt home cooks in the Mediterranean would stock up different kinds of oil in their pantry, and if they do, well good on them for having so much shelf space.