Palette Expansion

Do you ever go to a clothing store and buy something and when you get it home and put it in your closet you discover you already have five items that are its twin?  You don’t even have to go look at your closet to say yes, especially if you are a middle-aged woman.  Naturally we are drawn to the same things over and over again.  In your defense as far as clothing goes you probably already know which colors and cuts look best on you, but there is something about looking at a store full of clothes that draws your eye to what you already have.

The same thing happens when we go to the grocery store.  A giant building full of thousands of different products and you probably buy mostly the same things over and over again.  Now you don’t have the “that soup looks good on me,” defense, but you may say, “I already tasted that and know I like it.”  There is one unattractive word for this buying the same thing over and over again phenomenon, “RUT.”

I am not a clothes expert and I do own more black pairs of pants than I can wear in a season, so I don’t know how to solve the clothing problem.   Of course you can buy something out of your element and it can hang, tags still on, in your closet never worn.   So the clothing rut is a more expensive problem.

But as far as food goes I do have a few suggestions to spice up your eating.  Actually spice is my suggestion.  Next time you go to the grocery stand in the dry spice aisle and blindly pick a new bottle of something.  Now if you are not that adventurous pick wide-eyed, but chose something you have never used before, like turmeric or smoked paprika.  Once you are at home with your new ingredient just do a Google search for recipes that use that spice and make one.

There is a great website called Smitten Kitchen by a blogger who takes great cookbook recipes and creates them in a step by step way with good photos, so if you are a truly unadventurous cook you can follow the steps easily.  If you really can’t find a recipe that uses your chosen ingredient message me and I will help you.

The whole point of this exercise is to expand your and your family’s taste buds with very little investment.  What you end up making does not have to be so foreign if you are just using a new spice with some familiar ingredients like a chicken or carrots.  The point is just to push yourself one step beyond where you normally go.

I seem to have every spice in the grocery store already so I can’t do the blind picking, but I do have a number of very exotic spices I bought on vacations and have never used so I will practice what I am preaching and am going to open one up and create a new recipe with it.

The good thing about trying this palette expansion with a spice is that it probably has few if any calories.  That makes January the perfect time to experiment.  So post back to me what you end up buying and trying.  I’m here to help so get out of your rut.