Do you belong to a particular religious group?

A dear friend of mine, close neigh­bour and accom­plice in my culi­nary explo­rations is also a mem­ber of a "med­ical cohort". A long time ago, he took part in tests for drugs, then agreed to be part of a group of sev­er­al hun­dred peo­ple who are fol­lowed over a very long peri­od of time (sev­er­al decades in his case).

These cohorts make it pos­si­ble to see how health and life expectan­cy evolve, and the mem­bers have to answer numer­ous ques­tion­naires on a reg­u­lar basis about their lifestyle, health, diet, etc. (the inter­net has prob­a­bly great­ly increased the num­ber and fre­quen­cy of questions).

A fort­night ago, we had a fair­ly healthy din­ner, veg­e­tar­i­an if not veg­an, with a carpac­cio of fen­nel with three cit­rus fruit­sas a starter, and ori­en­tal car­rot pas­ta as the main course (yes, I'll give you the recipe, I often make "car­rot sauces" with pas­ta), and a dessert of his own inven­tion, a sort of smoked tea and chico­ry grani­ta, which is a real treat.

And that's when he told us about the cohort, won­der­ing how the meal would fit into the questionnaire.

Well, we got the answer today: the meal did fit, but it must have raised a red flag, because he got a very polite email say­ing "we're hav­ing a bit of trou­ble fit­ting you in, your diet doesn't match any known cui­sine, are you part of a reli­gious group? Sikh? Jain?"

It made us laugh, but it also made me very hap­py, because it shows how my cook­ing is what I want it to be: wan­der­ing and tasty, a mix­ture of influ­ences that har­monise and enhance each other.