Adventure dinner

Unlike lunches, for which I embrace stagnation, I love having new things for dinner. My especial favorites are adventure dinners: things that are totally foreign to me and which I've had only rarely, if ever before.

When I was at Stanford, I'd always try to get Jed to have adventure dinners with me. We were working our way through all the restaurants in an Asian shopping center in Cupertino. Most times we'd be the only white people there. We usually ordered by pointing at things. It was so much fun! I always wanted to try the vegetable dishes, which generally varied daily and must have depended on whatever they had gotten fresh. Inevitably Jed would ask what the vegetable was that day. I don't know why he bothered. The waitress never knew what the vegetable's English name was. And even if it had one and she knew what it was, would it really have mattered? I doubt that the name would mean anything to him, so it certainly wouldn't be able to inform his decision the way that he believed it would. And I would always insist that we get it anyway. Because I love random Asian vegetables that I've never heard of before. The more anonymous and mysterious they are the better!

I've tried to have a few adventure dinners here in Davis, but haven't been too successful. There just isn't much adventure in Davis. The closest I've come is probably the Ethiopian restaurant in Sacramento. Mmmmm. But I don't know too many people who'll go there with me (and share spicy dishes). I also really want to go out for dim sum sometime, but Sundays are my lazy days, which doesn't really jibe with a brunch-time trip to Sacramento. And I'm short an adventure dinner (brunch) buddy. Anybody out there in the area and want to expand your palette with me? Anybody have any adventurous dining suggestions for the Sacramento area?

Aside from lack of options, the other thing keeping me from having adventure dinners is that I just don't go out to eat very much any more. I generally do a very good job of cooking for myself, and have enough leftovers around that I really don't need to go out for dinner. I do try to infuse some adventure into my cooking, however. A couple of years ago I conquered my fear of fish sauce. Since then I haven't had any other phobias to smash through, but I have tried quite a few new things. I feel that this year, in particular, I've cooked lots of things that I've never cooked before. These include:

• Arborial rice. In fact, this triggered quite a risotto kick! I went from never making risotto before to having three different kinds in short succession (Beet & Beet Green Risotto, Eggplant & Tomato Risotto, Celeriac Risotto).
• Celeriac (aka Celery Root)
• Quinoa
• Chayote
• Collard greans
• Kale
  

The only real problem with cooking so many new things is that I usually have to ask a produce guy to help me identify them! I should probably do that more often anyway, produce guys being so generally helpful, and I'm not necessarily that good at correctly selecting the not-so-well labeled produce that I've used before, even. For example, I always buy the wrong ethnicity of eggplant. I'm so bad at telling Chinese and Japanese eggplant apart (and they're really quite different) that I have 0% identification success!

And, of course, in addition to new ingredients, I always seek out new recipes. Probably at least half of everything I cook is a new recipe. (Gotta love the internet!) Do you know of any exciting foods you feel certain I've never had before? If you think I can get them and their ingredients around here, please tell me! Send me the recipe! Or take me out for an adventure with you!