A Culinary Excursion

(My brother, Jeff, is a wonderful cook who's not afraid to try new dishes. Thanks, younger brother, for the culinary tip!)

On a recent visit to my brother's house, he whipped up a fabulous dinner of chicken simmered in raspberry chipotle sauce. I'm not exactly sure what a chipotle is, exactly, but it's delicious.
So now I'm on a new kick -- if it can be grilled, fried or sautéed, I'm smothering it in chipotle sauce.

In a few weeks, my husband will mutiny, and I'll have to find some new cooking binge.

That's the way it goes in my kitchen, and it all started with ketchup.

My dad loved ketchup with everything -- scrambled eggs, fish, potatoes -- almost everything was covered in Heinz 57.

As a result, I'm a ketchup fan. I don't have fries and a burger -- I have ketchup with a few fries thrown in and two layers of ketchup with a hamburger patty in the middle.

I also love ketchup and mustard on a hot dog, which brings to mind my love affair with mustard. We grew up on plain, yellow mustard. In my 30's, I discovered two words that would change the way I looked at a bottle of mustard -- Grey Poupon.

Once hooked, I branched out and discovered honey mustard. For years, I was on a honey mustard kick, ordering a bit of lettuce with four containers of honey mustard dressing.

Then I read the calorie count.

No wonder that dressing tasted so good.

Then I discovered lemon pepper. I first tasted lemon pepper on broiled catfish. Growing up in Louisiana, we had catfish fried, baked and in gumbo.

But eating that lowly fish with lemon pepper took the dish to a new level. I was hooked and bought a huge bottle of lemon pepper seasoning from one of the wholesale clubs.

I proceeded to put lemon pepper on everything -- chicken, steak, hamburgers, roasts -- everything off the stove and from the oven was a shade of black and yellow.

After a while, my family hid the bottle, but I'd already moved on to Old Bay Seasoning. Created from 12 herbs and spices, Old Bay actually pushed the hallowed, giant bottle of Tony Chachere's seasoning out of the forefront of my cabinet for a while.

Old Bay was my new passion. I'd seen that rectangular can in the store for years, but I thought it was for chowder, not southern cooking. I was wrong.

Everything that came out of the oven was covered with Old Bay. Someone hid the can after an extra heavy dosing on a chicken one night. So I resurrected Tony from the back of the cabinet, and proceeded to fall in love with that Cajun staple once again.

Then I read the sodium content on the side of the bottle.

Hello Mrs. Dash. After one use, it was Goodbye, Mrs. Dash.

I've only skimmed the surface when it comes to sauces and seasonings. There's the whole world of allemande and Bechamel sauces and habanero and white pepper spices.

There's even an chipotle chile seasoning. I could probably prepare a chicken with the chipotle chile seasoning and then cover it in chipotle raspberry sauce. My mouth's already watering.

As with all culinary crazes, this one will run its course, sooner rather than later, because while I was shopping this evening, I wandered down the spice aisle and saw an intriguing bottle, "Chinese Five Spice."

Something tells me a new adventure awaits my family.

Pass the Alka-Seltzer.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.