Raw food chef vs. Donut Deskers

October 15th, 2008 at 04:43pm Mike DeDoncker

Ben Rubendall, a former business editor here at the Register Star, once offered the opinion that people in our newsroom would eat anything.

Actually, what he said was, “You could leave a plate of lightly salted cow chips out in the newsroom and people would eat them.”

I thought of Ben’s assertion when I was covering a story about raw food preparation as part of a healthy eating lifestyle. The subject of the story, Brenda Richter, was kind enough to prepare four dishes — much more than I asked for to be able to write the story — and insisted on offering samples.

I tried some of each dish — a soup with cucumbers, spinach, avocado, cilantro, orange juice, garlic and other spices; a kale salad with raisins and pine nuts; zucchini with marinara sauce, and a flourless chocolate cake — and, while I wasn’t used to all of the combinations, they were dishes I would eat again. But, as someone who went through the CHIP program and who will still follow an all or mostly vegetarian diet once or twice a week, I wasn’t the best test for Brenda’s fare.

I decided that the people Ben Rubendall said would eat anything (their successors anyway) were a far better test. I mean our newsroom actually has a table designated as “the donut desk”, the site of an almost endless succession of cakes, cookies, candies and, yes, the Friday Morning Donut Club’s offerings.

So I put Brenda’s food on the donut desk — it didn’t collapse from the totally foreign fare — and asked samplers to tell me what they thought.

Here are some of the responses:

“Soup: Depite the off-putting Christmas-tree color, the cilantro flavor in the soup triumphs, and it’s got a welcome bit of a zing to it. The consistency is too smooth. Would rather have bit into the cucumbers and avocados, instead of drinking those veggies down.”

“The cake tastes kind of wheat-y at first, but you can tell it’s supposed to be chocolate. The texture was more brownie or torte than cake – but I like it! Any idea what’s in it?” 

“The veggie was bland. The chocolate cake was OK. I like the zucchini.”

“I vote thumbs up on all but the green soup.”

Now, remember, these are people whose four main food groups are fat, sugar, grease and chips, so I’d say Brenda came off pretty well against a pretty tough audience.

The story comes out next week. Give it a look if you’re interested in getting more veggies in your diet.

   

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