America has given the world Twinkies™ and Hamburger Helper™, so it’s only fair that we embrace convenience foods from other cuisines. Indian food is a prime candidate for me because making anything beyond curry is a mystery. I frequent Indian markets from time to time to buy bulk spices like the aforementioned curry, cardamom for roasting lamb, and cumin. Recently, I found myself staring at shelves full of ready preparations for busy cooks, a gold mine for untutored cooks and eager eaters like me.

I firmly believe that love of smokey flavors is genetically encoded from the days of cavemen. In any case, it works for me. Barbecue is hot smoked, which means the food is cooked at oven temperatures in the presence of smoke from wood chips. Cold smoking is more difficult. Cold smoking is done between 80 degrees F and 100 degrees F, with smoking times from four hours to four days. The process relies on smoke to cure food instead of heat. Cold smoking is used for salmon, cheese, and … butter.

Mountain apples are common in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. I didn’t know it, but there are several different fruits called mountain apple. We encountered the variety shown above at the ‘Imiloa lunch buffet, where they were served cold with a pinkish brown spice as a dessert. It is delicately flavored, crisp, and juicy, but not very sweet. Fans of mountain apples, scientific fans, that is, know this variety as syzygium samarangense, Note the exaggerated pear shape, which explains why it also sometimes called bellfruit. They are a beautiful bright red.

At a glance, Chinese pork strips look like bacon. Upon close examination they still look like bacon, albeit in long strips having an inch-square cross section. One difference is that they are very well cured, so well preserved that Asian markets may have a box of the strips left at room temperature like so much kindling. The flavor is distinct, with sweet spices along with allure of redundant pork fat. What more could a person want?

Cod roe are the eggs of codfish. The egg sacks are sold fresh, frozen, or canned. The fresh sacks may be burst and the eggs eaten fresh or salted and preserved as a type of caviar. The simplest preparation is to boil the sacks, and just slice it up and eat it. It is a very rich food, which I guess is what one would expect from a plate of eggs. The cooked flavor is mildly fishy, not as strong as some other fish roe. Cod roe is enjoyed from Scotland to Korea, and many places in between. I think it is a treat.

The Food Network’s Chopped has a reasonable premise. Great chefs do not need recipes to work with good ingredients. We amateurs in the audience can learn from how the pros handle the ingredients. That’s the premise of the successful “Iron Chef America” program, and it works in that show. … The problem with Chopped is that it artificially overconstrained in a way that diminishes the culinary craft in favor of unrelated skills. How about adding a hungry dog to the kitchen or having only two burners on the stove? That might be fun, but it would have nothing to do with good cooking.

A simple plan: pick up a few basic ingredients at some market near the park and drive up to a picnic spot. I hope you have done the same thing. The point of this post is to encourage this particular delight. I had in mind bread, salami, cheese and olives, great low-fuss stuff. No chaffing dishes required. Good fortune helped make a good thing better.

70% of California’s Oysters come from Humboldt Bay on the north coast, about a hundred miles from the Oregon border. The Arcata Bay Oyster Festival (Arcata Bay is the north end of Humboldt Bay) was held last weekend, and attending reminded me that I have not said enough about oysters. Famous chef James Beard said his two favorite foods were raw apples and raw oysters. There is much to be said.

The Loco Moco is a Hawaiian breakfast dish of a hamburger patty on rice topped with fried eggs and brown gravy. There are many substitutes for the hamburger, but there is no know low calorie version. Wikipedia says the Loco Moco originated in Hilo, Hawaii in 1949 at the request of some local boys who were after some quick cheap eats. Loco, Spanish for crazy, was a nickname of one of the boys, and moco was picked to rhyme.

Periwinkles are a family of marine snails. They are popularly consumed in Europe and the Far East, but they have not caught on as regular menu items in the U.S. Recently I happened upon a bag of frozen cooked periwinkle meat in market near San Francisco. Traditionally, periwinkle eaters have extracted the cooked meat from the shells with a special two-tined fork or, if forced to improvise, a toothpick. Having the meat extracted is a convenience.