Food Inventors
Food Inventors is a weekly meet up who's goal is to invent new dishes that are not connected to cultural cuisine. This means experimenting with new flavors and cooking techniques. Each meeting will be a multi-step process. The impetus is that currently there are no reasons to constrain foods and dishes to cultural themes, as ingredients from any culture are equally available. In addition, especially in vegetarian food, there is little experimentation with new forms of cuisine and instead most 'experimentation' is simply piggybacking on well established dish forms while changing a few ingredients. In vegetarian food there are many dishes that serve to emulate meat dishes, which is not only futile, but pointless (and boring).
Step 1
Meet and discuss:
Interested parties will meet and decide what types of flavors and ingredients they want to use for this week's meal. Starting from the flavors that are desired they will construct a new type of dish to accommodate the selected ingredients.
Step 2
Purchase:
Currently the plan is to purchase the foods at Haymarket, but any grocery store will likely suffice. Any adventurous members of the group will go retrieve the ingredients while changing the recipe to conform to price and availability (and possibly come up with new dishes on the spot should they be cheap enough to easily incorporate).
Step 3
Cook:
Obviously the most fun part, hopefully this will be accompanied by ample social lubrication as well as artful photography of the cooking process.
Step 4
Eat:
The 2nd most fun part, but easily the riskiest. All participants must pay attention, as they will be tested on this later.
Step 5
Critique:
The members will come up with what parts of the dish they thought worked and what parts did not. If a certain combination of flavors but not necessarily ingredients containing those flavors was liked it can be tried again for a future dish. If a dish form is liked but contained inopportune ingredients, then that can be accounted for as well in the future.
Step 6
Blog:
A blog post will be made chronicling all of these steps. The result and crituique will be listed at the bottom in the hopes that others attempt the same thing again later, but pick up where we left off, allowing them to make the next iteration of whatever food was invented in the hopes that new dishes are created and perfected via this process.
Events
- Inaugural Meeting: Saturday Feb 19th, planning starts at 4 pm.
