Curd cheese & orange zest cookies and Sainsbury's Taste Dictionary

These days when you eat out, you won't bat an eyelid, when someone takes photos of their food. In many cases those images go straight on the social media, shared with friends and followers. I've, ahem, done that, though in my defense I usually do it with a blog post in mind. My husband who was first embarrassed by my behaviour, now takes it easy. And I do try to do it as discreetly as I can (meaning that I don't stand on the chair over the table to take a better photo).
Recent research revealed some fascinating data about our obsession with food. Apparently we think and talk about food about 16 hours a week on average, which is almost six years of our adult lives. Like many foodie bloggers, I probably spend even more time reading about food on food blogs, in magazines and books, writing recipe posts and food reviews etc.
While we spend a considerable amount of time on food culture in general, our food vocabulary is not varied, with "delicious, tasty and nice" being our top three food adjectives. If anything, Britons use only six different words to describe meals each week.
To remedy this situation, Sainsbury's has created a Taste Dictionary to help us expand our foodie vocabulary.
The dictionary was written by wordsmith Susie Dent and illustrated by Rebecca Ohta.
Sainsbury's Taste Dictionary: 101 ways to describe each mouthful is a useful resource and a splendid compilation of words, ranging from quite common "bittersweet, succulent, luscious, candied and gooey" to such gems like amarine (bitter and sour in taste, when talking about cooking apples, grapefruit, pomegranate molasses and gooseberries), angular (i.e. highly acidic when describing lemon, vinegar, pickles and kimchi) and medulline (relating to the soft pulp or pitch of a fruit, for example, oranges, persimmon, lemons and lime).

There are some words that I personally never used in my blog posts like
- uliginous (creamy, soft and smooth to taste, e.g, poached eggs, avocado, creme caramel and chocolate mousse);
- suaveolent (deliciously scented and sweet-smelling- tarte tatin, passion fruit and hot chocolate)
- piscose (fishy in taste, e.g. Thai fish sauce, tiger prawns and anchovy essence)
and my new favourite -
mordacious i.e. sharp and possessing a real bite, for example, Worcestershire sauce, Granny Smith apples, gooseberries and mustard.

This little book is a useful source of information on how to improve your foodie vocabulary.
Sainsbury's Taste Dictionary has been created as a limited run of books and is available to download as a PDF (<--- visit the page for the PDF download, if you fancy to learn new ways to describe food). If you're lucky to see it in the supermarkets, grab one for future reference or to give as a gift to your foodie friends.

Today I baked curd cheese and orange zest cookies. They are aromatic, indulgent and toothsome.

Curd cheese and orange zest cookies (makes about 34 cookies)
Ingredients:
zest of 2 oranges
100g curd cheese
100g margarine (Flora light)
180g caster sugar
1 medium egg
1tsp vanilla bean paste
325g self-raising flour
60g oats

Preheat the oven to 180C. Put the foil or greaseproof paper on two baking trays.
In a big mixing bowl mix together the orange zest, curd cheese, margarine, caster sugar and egg. Add one egg, vanilla bean paste, flour and oats and mix well until you have a soft dough.
Divide into walnut-sized pieces, roll into balls, then flatten them and place on the trays. Using a fork, make a slight indentation on top of each cookie.
Bake for 15+ minutes until lightly golden. Cool on the wire rack.
Eat warm, or cold. They will keep well in a tin for a couple of days.

Disclosure: I received Sainsbury's Taste Dictionary and a supermarket voucher to buy the ingredients. All opinions are my own.