Fish fingers with rice

Let me tell you a story. Yesterday, my very foolish flatmate asked if I could cook for us. I didn't have time to go to a supermarket to buy any food so I told her that I could do it if she would be happy to eat whatever I had in the cupboard.

The truth is that I can't really cook. I'm very happy to feed myself though and I'll just cook things that I would like to eat. Lately I've been eating a lot of pasta with cheese in green curry sauce. According to some people it's weird.

Pasta with cheese in green curry sauce.

When I got home I looked into the cupboard to see what I had. There was cheesy pasta, crushed tomatoes, canned meatballs, red pesto, chow mein stir fry sauce, jelly, a pot noodle, red kidney beans, black eyed beans and chick peas. I had no idea what to do with all the beans and peas, but I figured that my foolish flatmate could eat them.

I ended up cooking some mince from the freezer. I learned that you should really defrost it properly before trying to fry it. But in the end it was all okay and I added some crushed tomatoes and black eyed beans with it. I learned that although it's apparently easy to cook things that come in cans, it's really not easy to open the cans. And then I just stirred half a jar of pesto in with the mince and the beans and let it boil a bit. And voilà it was ready to be served with the rice that was ready before I had even started the cooking because it was very difficult to fry the mince that very closely resembled an ice cube.

My flatmate did eat the food. But she said that she would have normally used pesto with pasta and chicken. I thought it went perfectly with mince and rice.

Do you think we're just too used to associating certain foods and tastes together? To give an another example, I used to cook fish fingers with pasta on Tuesdays. This mainly happened because the person who I was feeding them didn't want me to boil rice, that I would normally eat them with, because she didn't trust my rice boiling skills. She protested eating fish fingers with pasta for a while too, because according to her they should always be eaten with chips. In my opinion eating  fatty fish fingers with fatty chips would have been too much. But in the end she got used to eating them with pasta.

So my point is, why do people do this? Why do we like ready meals so much? Where do these set structures of what is meant to go together come from?

Another example involving fish fingers is the first episode of the 5th series of the new Doctor Who serials where the eleventh Doctor Who is hungry after his regeneration and asks 7-year-old Amy Pond to cook him various different things. In the end he asked if he could have some fish fingers with custard.

The Doctor happily eating fish fingers with custard.

Amy Pond found this very strange. And the viewers were meant to find it strange too. But why? Why are we so used to eating what we think is right to eat? There are people who go on holidays to foreign countries and take food from home with them just because you can't buy it in their destination. Why are we so afraid of trying new things? In some cultures insects are the greatest delicacy. I'm not telling you to eat insects, although they are full of protein and potentially quite good for you. In our culture they are not something that we would think to eat. But they do sell a lot of things in supermarkets that we are allowed to mix and match if we're brave enough.

Oh, and yes, I do find Doctor Who as a very educative program. Here's the bit with the fish fingers and custard!

Now I'm off to possibly play some golf. Have a tasty evening!