I don’t really have the passion to be a full-fledged foodie, but I love to eat as much as the next guy. A post about foodpairing.be on JoshSpear.com the other day got me thinking about how something subtle, like adding an unusual ingredient to a familiar dish, can be a quick fix for a boring diet.
My diet, unfortunately, rates as one of the most boring on the planet. I handle myself reasonably well in the kitchen, but I subsist on a lot of bachelor staples – black beans, omelets, chicken and pasta. The skillet has become my comfort zone. I figured I could use Foodpairing to put a twist on one of these old fallbacks.
The first thing you see on the site is a display of around 40 foods, and clicking each one leads to a vast web of pairings from the conventional to the exotic. I gave grapefruit a spin first. The top of the web showed a cluster of other fruits that grapefruit plays well with, and at the bottom was … manchego? Foodies will know exactly what this is, but I didn’t. It’s a Spanish sheep cheese that goes great in omelets. Potato omelets. And, oh, look, there’s potato on the left side of the pairing web for grapefruit. Now we’re in business.
The Project: a potato-grapefruit-manchego omelet. The Potapefruit.
The Procedure: Boil a potato. Preheat oven to 375. Put 4 egg whites in one bowl and the egg yolks in the other. Put a little sugar and vanilla in the yolks. Beat contents of each bowl furiously, combine. Grate 3/4 cup of manchego. Cut up the potato and some grapefruit, put them in a frying pan (about 7″ worked for me) with a little butter at the bottom. Put the cheese on top, let it melt slightly, then pour the eggs over the whole shebang and cook for a minute and a half. Then place in over for 10 minutes, remove, and turn over onto plate. The Potapefruit should be warm and way fluffy now. Optional style points: dust with powdered sugar.
It might look something like this
The Post-Game: On the plus side, I’m glad I learned how to do the souffle-style omelet. This would be great with any berries you might have laying around – just throw them in and you have an easy treat. The potato and manchego tasted perfect together, as expected, and they combined well with the sweet omelet base. The grapefruit, which is the part we really care about here, basically flopped. It was far too sour for the omelet crust, and it didn’t go well with … the eggs? Well, duh. I should have seen that coming. It’s certainly not Foodpairing’s fault that I decided to throw its lovely combinations into a base it never recommended. Eggs are not on the pairing web for grapefruit. Although I doubt that grapefruit, manchego and potatoes in a blender would be delicious, I’d be willing to bet you could garnish a nice au gratin with a grapefruit slice and it would come off marvelously.
If you decide to give Foodpairing a try, let me know how your experiment comes out.
Need more? Check my tumblr, 
When I choose again to do something horrible in the kitchen, probably with the prompting of the few items left in the fridge and the vague knowledge that there was a receipt, somewhere, that involved those things, I will now turn to Foodpairing, thanks to you.
I love that you did this. The time and effort it takes to basically wing your own recipe. I am impressed. What a great project.
I will basically follow up Julia’s compliments of you, if only to add that it sounded pretty gross when you presented the idea to me the first time … and it doesn’t look like it ended up any better.
But it was a good shot, right? I made a sweet cheese omelet once, but didn’t have any salt. Solution? Soy sauce! right? No. Wrong.
Isn’t kitchen experimentation fun, even if it doesn’t work great? I’ve been blogging about my kitchen experiments at http://singledudefood.blogspot.com. It’s pretty fun to watch stuff come together and try to break away from the bachelor staples.
Cheers, bud,
Bill
I’ve…never tried mixing eggs with anything interesting (I do make a decent turkey bacon-potato omelet). But the most interesting thing I’ve had with grapefruit was a grapefruit orange fennel avocado salad. It was remarkable.
The orange and grapefruit segments were peeled of their membranes. The fennel and avocado were sliced thinly. The dressing was orange juice, a little olive oil, a little lemon juice, a little salt, a little sugar (to taste). I found it could use a little ground pepper, too.
Maybe a bit too avant-garde, though…