Seasoning Your Food

One of the many lessons I've learned from experience is the value of seasoning food. With incredibly perfect ingredients you don't need much at all. I can't afford those much of the time. Instead I buy ingredients I can afford and season them to make them tastier. Restaurants know this too, so to increase profits they add lots of salt to things. The salt perks up your tastebuds so you notice the flavor more. Chinese restaurants and pre-prepared foods use MSG (Mono-Sodium Glutamate) which is another appetite enhancer. Most "Asian" sauces contain this too.

My best surprises in seasoning were the following:

• Cumin is good with potatoes. I learned this before eating Indian food, which pairs them all the time, but its fantastic on hash browns and oven baked fries. 
• Allspice can be bought in packets for $1/oz (this is cheap) and used in baked goods like muffins is an appetite enhancer. Great in cookies too. 
• Eggs with a dash of soy sauce are great scrambled. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese when you're done and they're even better. 
• Reducing sugar in pumpkin pie and other baked goods often makes them taste much better because you can taste the ingredients and seasonings that the sugar was covering up. This is true with apple and cherry pie too. 
• If you add semi sweet chocolate chips to dry roasted salted nuts, both taste better. The salt makes the chocolate taste better, and the chocolate works with the nuts nicely. It's a good combo for snacking AND dark or semi-sweet chocolate is good for male fertility, mainly due to the theobromine and thiamine in the chocolate. The omega-3 fatty acids in the nuts may or may not be good for you, but they aren't bad. Same as in Salmon
• Salt your meat AFTER you cook it. Otherwise the salt dries it out. Unless that was the plan all along. This is key with Steak. Bring solutions are great with smoking or slow roasting meats, such as proper BBQ. Otherwise cook with the other seasonings, let rest, then salt right before serving.
• Meatloaf made with shredded carrot, fine diced onion, and celery with an egg and a dollop of either soy sauce or BBQ sauce is fantastically delicious, mainly because the french trinity seasons meat well. It is also healthy.
• Vanilla yoghurt goes with pretty much every kind of fruit, even canned. If you're trying to lose weight or eat healthier, this is an option. 
• The best way to figure out how to season something is to open various spices in your collection and smell them while thinking of the food you're about to cook. Your brain will tell you if that season has been used before and if it was tasty or not. Turns out that smells are strong memory triggers and shortcut around other parts of the brain so this is a very efficient way to do it. 

Hope some of these tips are new to you. I find they're very helpful when living on a small food budget. It will likely save you years in experimentation.