Start Making Choices: Spice Up Your Meals


Eat Well Article. brought to you by Real Simple®

Spice Up Your Meals
No, it isn't hard to be an international chef—even if you rarely travel beyond your local grocery store. By simply adding a few herbs and spices to your kitchen collection, you can prepare dishes from all over the world. Here, the ingredients that make each cuisine come alive.
Caribbean: Nutmeg is a main ingredient in Caribbean cooking—for good reason: It's grown there. They also use a lot of allspice and ginger.
French: French cooking uses virtually no spices but plenty of herbs because the herbs grow in many French backyards. That means rosemary, thyme, tarragon, and marjoram, to name a few—all of which can show up in the classic blend herbes de Provence, which you can make by combining an assortment of those herbs (fresh or dried) in your kitchen. Just chop up the components and mix them to taste, or look online for one of the many recipes for this blend, which sometimes includes basil, savory, cracked fennel, or lavender.
German: Nutmeg and mace (another part of the nutmeg plant) are at the top of the list in German cooking. Mace and nutmeg are not indigenous to Germany, but they go in a lot of sausages.
Indian: Contrary to popular belief, there is no one spice called curry. Curry powder is actually a mix of any number of pungent spices, and the recipe for that blend can vary from cook to cook. Cumin and turmeric are staples, though. Other possibilities include—but aren't limited to—coriander, ginger, black pepper, red pepper, cloves, white pepper, nutmeg, fennel, cinnamon, saffron, and mace.
Italian: Many of Italian cuisine's characteristic flavors don't come from spices, but a lot of the things we call spices—like garlic and onion—get used a lot in Italian cooking.
Latin: Cumin is used in pretty much all Hispanic cooking. Other staples: onions, garlic, and Mexican oregano (available at finer grocery stores). Mexican oregano tends to be more bitter and earthy than the oregano you use for Italian cooking. It holds its own better among the other strong spices because it's not as delicate and sweet.
Scandinavian: Cardamom is used to flavor coffee in the Middle East, but it plays a role in Scandinavian cooking, too, particularly in desserts. It's a little green pod that has a very distinctive taste that's almost like eucalyptus.
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