Bakersfield Needs To Eat

Hi, my name is Brittany and I love food, and no, not in the “American Pie” sense. Let’s just say I’m obsessed with recipes. There, I’ve cleared the air and now we can move on. My friend Jed created a blog about cooking and eating in Bakersfield. That’s where we live, Bakersfield, California. It’s the armpit of the west coast and if you can’t find anything better to do, you eat. However ingenious Jed’s plan was, he seemed to lack due diligence on this project. So, I’m here to save the day. Hopefully, with his cooperation, we can make this a collaborative effort, if not; I’m just going to rip off his idea. Sound good? Great. Let’s get started.

I’m going to start with the basics; shopping for your ingredients. This doesn’t need to be an arduous task. It’s easy, fun, and at the very least, it’s less expensive than eating out.
I find the roughest thing for beginners to shop for is produce, even though it is usually (in my opinion) one of the most important parts of the meal. It can serve as anything from a garnish, to a side, to the main dish. Moral of the story, fruit and veggies are important so you need to get over your fear of them.

Here are some tips for picking out your roughage:
• You can sense the quality of produce, don’t worry about looking silly, you can go ahead and sniff the navel of fruit, or the end of vegetables where the open.
• Look to see if it’s a bright color. That’s usually nature’s sign that something is okay to eat. So if it’s dull, or bruised you probably won’t want it.
• Pinch vegetable like pea pods lightly, you want to feel their texture, but you have not bought them so you don’t have the right to damage them.
Other than that, you need to use your most important sense of all, common sense. If something’s skin or peel is torn, don’t buy it. If it smells bad, don’t buy it. If you have doubts about it, ask someone, and if you don’t think they know what they’re talking about, move on to the next item on your shopping list, and look elsewhere for the needed item.

Awesome! So now that we can pick our own produce out, here is a quick and easy recipe made out of our fresh ingredients:

15 min 15 min prep
romaine lettuce

1 avocado

3 green onions

9 cherry tomatoes

1 Italian salad mix (Dole makes a good one.)

1. Wash and dry lettuce and tear into bite size pieces.
2. Slice the avocado, green onions and tomatoes.
3. Place all ingredients in a large salad bowl and add contents of Italian Salad Kit.
4. Toss thoroughly.
5. Serve immediately.
Sound too easy? Well, settle down tiger. The recipes will only get more exciting, and more advanced as we go along.

Peace.
Brittany.