Rachel Rappaport is a member of the Cookthinktank, and the food writer and recipe creator behind the award-winning, Baltimore-based food blog Coconut & Lime. Here’s a selection of Rachel’s recipes.

Sweet or salty?

I would have to say salty because I only really like sweet in desserts (or naturally in fruit) and I eat sweet the least. In an ideal world, both.

Which ingredient(s) do you use most?

Fresh produce? It seems like I am always cleaning vegetables. We eat vast amounts of rice. I tend to go on kicks with spices; right now it is all about the smoky: smoked paprika and ground chipotle.

What’s the cooking sound you most love?

Frying bacon.

What’s your favorite cooking smell?

It is hard to pick favorites. It’s a tie between bacon and cookies. Or else it is frying garlic. Or a big pan of sautéed onions and celery.

What are the qualities you most admire in a dish?

That it is texturally interesting and the flavors are complex. I also appreciate a twist on an old favorite.

What is your most treasured possession in the kitchen?

My bright aqua Kitchenaid. It is such a time saver.

What is a dirty word in your kitchen?

Dishes.

What are you afraid to do in the kitchen?

Bake two sheets of cookies at once. Sometimes they come out fine, sometimes half the batch is ruined. It makes baking more perilous than I’d like it to be.

What won’t you eat?

Ketchup, cantaloupe and pumpkin pie. They are so strong-smelling, I can’t take it. Even I find my aversion to pumpkin pie puzzling: I like everything that goes into it, I just don’t like the final product.

Have you ever lost your appetite for a food you once loved?

Yes! Apparently as a toddler I was a fiend for ketchup and ate it in vast quantities. So much so that my mother bought a special pump dispenser for it because I had a hard time getting it out of the glass bottle. Now I can no longer stand to even sit at the same table as the stuff. The smell makes my stomach turn.

What is your favorite food-related word?

“Ribbon.” I love beating something to a ribbon.

What is your favorite food-related scene from literature or the movies?

I always enjoyed the food scenes in the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary. They always were sitting down to dinner and their meals really fit in with the rest of the story. I remember one time the dad was out of work and they had to eat tongue which Ramona (and I) found more than a little horrific. There were also other great moments — Ramona eating one bite out of a bushel of apples because the first bite was the best and on another occasion breaking a raw egg on her head by accident during a hard boiled egg fad at school. Food was such a part of their daily life, which even as a child struck me as extremely realistic. I was also enamored by the food (snow candy!) in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. So many novels pay so little attention to food unless it is actually about food in some way. I read a lot (about a book a day) and rarely is there anything beyond a passing mention of food, which I find odd.

What’s your favorite food-shopping errand or journey?

I actually don’t enjoy food-shopping as much as one would think but I do enjoy trying new foods, so I frequently travel to various ethnic groceries or well-stocked markets to check out what is new. I also enjoy the farmer’s market but it occurs much too early and is much too crowded to be a true favorite.

To which country would you move for the food?

Japan. I love sushi and Japanese candy. I am also intrigued by their array of unusually flavored soft-serve ice cream.

What’s your poison?

I love Coke in a can. I also enjoy homemade club soda.

What are you craving right now?

A dark chocolate-covered caramel from Rheb’s.

(Image created at Wordle.)

Posted by kristin in cookthinktank, the cookthink questionnaire | | Subscribe to this feed