On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:00:03 -0400, F*O*A*D wrote:

On 3/27/14, 7:42 PM, Boating All Out wrote:
In article ,
says...

On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:18:58 -0700 (PDT), Tim
wrote:

Same here with the sweet potatoes but my wife likes them.
She is not much on spices tho.

Bake and put some salted butter on them. Yum.
Candy them with brown sugar and orange juice. Yumyum.


We bake them and put a tiny pat of butter and a bit of salt on them,
probably because we like the taste of sweet potatoes and don't see a
need to camo that taste in a bunch of peppery spices that leave you
tasting the spices, but not the underlying ingredient.

Many of us just aren't wild about the taste, so we enhance it. Lots of folks do that with rockfish
also.


If I cook a steak, it's the steak I want to taste, not some recipe of
ingredients that hide the fact that it is a steak, and not a melange of
fiery spices. I might use a dab of steak sauce or ketchup, maybe.

Steak and sweet potatoes are treated differently by most folks.


We have a friend from India who says that many highly spiced foods are
prepared that way in his part of the world because the underlying
product on which the spices are placed are not that fresh, and the
spiciness helps hide that fact. That shouldn't be a problem in this country.

On the other hand, a visit to an Indian restaurant can provide some fine dining - even with all the
spices on the fresh food.

I know in Europe many sauces were developed to hide the poor quality of
beef, poultry, fish, et cetera, but that was in the days before reliable
refrigeration.

But the Europeans still use spices on most of their foods. Maybe because a good use of spices makes
the dish taste better?