Mouth Feel

[Should be interesting to see what sort of Google searches THAT title lands me in....]

Recently I was feeling that all of our food this year has been remarkably similar, which is impossible because of all the wild experimentation that I've been doing in the cooking department. But, we finally figured out what is missing--

The mouth feel of processed foods.

Think of biting into a piece of pizza--the way the melting cheese feels in your mouth. We don't get that chewy/fat/greasy type of food, which is probably altogether a good thing to be honest. (Technically, I could slather things in grease and cheese, we are doing this for our health and eating that sort of unhealthy crap would pretty much blow the whole point) We do use cheese, but pretty sparingly--favoring strongly flavored cheese in small amounts versus the chewy-but-tasteless cheese product that many pizza companies use.

Along similar lines--chocolate. Cocoa (the unsweetened powder stuff) is fair game, but to become even semi-sweet chocolate, all sorts of things have to be added to the cocoa making it not so much fair game. We get chocolate cake & we've had chocolate ice cream several times, but the mouth feel of a piece of chocolate is just impossible to replicate--or I haven't found it so far. We do have a few locally owned chocolate shops that I think I'll go talk to when I'm a bit more mobile.

Another type of mouth feel we don't get would be cream cheese--that soft, creamy type of thing. By very definition, our diet this year is very low-fat, vegetable & grain centered, so it makes sense that the fattier side of the American diet would be missing, but I hadn't ever thought about how it feels to eat such thing. Perhaps one of these days I'll use one of my "cheats" on a Snickers bar......