John: A lot of scratch cooks like to cheat. I was chatting with Mimi and she was moaning about being sick of her own cooking. A lot of people get sick of their own cooking because they don’t go out of their way to change the flavor profiles. One way to do this is by checking out different kinds of spice blends, especially ones from other cultures, and using them profusely until you get sick of them, then moving on to something else.
There’s one international brand that even has its own Reddit page because it’s kind of semi-controversial, even though people who use it love it. It’s an Eastern European spice from Croatia called Vegeta. You can get a little shaker of it, but it also comes in big cans — like five pounds of it. They use it so profusely. It’s kind of a salt substitute and general seasoning, and I think it’s mostly chicken bouillon, which is a great salt substitute. You can get some Mahler chicken stock powder and use that instead of salt — I use it in my spaghetti sauces and it really does the trick. Vegeta is so much like chicken bouillon that you could actually make soup with it. Just start using it on everything for about a month and you’ll have a nice different flavor profile until you get sick of it. Highly recommended. I always have a pile of it around.
Adam: Hey, what is Mimi’s signature dish?
John: Well, she actually has a signature dish, though the name of it is kind of misleading. It’s called glop.
Adam: Glop?
John: Yeah. If you challenged her, she wouldn’t be able to deny it. It’s a vegetable dish that’s just a mishmash of all kinds of things — just glop.
Adam: I would love to have the recipe for glop. Or is it just slop repurposed into glop?
John: There may be a recipe coming.