Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_wine

I hardly had to click on this to know that you must have imported some ideas from your gazpacho.

Though I know some people might chow down on marrow bones, I tend to think of it as a starter and typically eat a portion with bread/toast before a main course of something less rich. I mean, it's pretty much like spreading pure fat on bread. "Rich" doesn't begin to describe it. How about a salad?

I saw @BitchinFixins' reply before I read the original post, and it does seem odd to me that someone would "ache" with desire to eat carbonara in a restaurant before ever eating it at home. I'm sure I ate my first dish of spaghetti and meatballs at home (mom's!) long before I ever ate the dish in a restaurant. Carbonara is perhaps even easier to make than that weeknight staple from our youth of spaghetti and meatballs and various other familiar pasta dishes. It's ridiculously simple. Why not make some at home first and then compare that with what a restaurant makes? Sure, a restaurant may make it better, but it just seems odd that you don't satisfy such a strong desire ("aching," really?) by whipping up a batch at home tonight or tomorrow.

what @rockfish42 and @franko said. Homebrewers have been dumping oak chips in their brews for some time. I see no reason why one couldn't take a piece of oak and, if desired, char it with a blowtorch. Why pay for an actual stave taken from an actual barrel?

@scotchncoffee said: "carbs are fine. Athletes especially are recommended to carb up as necessary. ... What is different is the source of carbs: replace the pasta, grains, and empty starches with sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, squash, berries, and the like."

Oh, so in other words "the Paleo Diet" is just what those of us who have good nutritional habits have long been doing? It's sad that a clever name has to be invented for a diet that should occur naturally to people. Nobody had to publish a so-called "diet" for me to understand that eating refined starches is less nutritionally sound than eating vegetables for the carbohydrate portion of my diet. People are sheep, wanting to be told what they should do by someone who claims to have all the answers.

Are you asking about eating a whole clove of raw garlic or what?--your question isn't clear.

As people have mentioned, eating raw garlic in smaller quantities as an ingredient in something is common. I enjoy aioli, for example. And all that kimchi I eat has raw garlic in it.

This has a sinister tone. Why am I picturing you as a lobster mafioso?

Basically, anything that's not particularly good for me and thus figures sparingly into my diet. For example, meat figures sparingly into our diet for health reasons, but on the occasions we say "damn the arteries, full speed ahead!" we buy the best we can find.

Ha!--I had an avocado and sardine sandwich at work today.

But my childhood sandwich was the avocado on white bread with mayonnaise that my mom would make for me. The East Coast kids thought I was nuts to eat a slimy green vegetable on a sandwich. Back then, lettuce and tomato were the limits of what people, especially kids in the East, tolerated on a sandwich.

re post above: "vegetarian," that is.

The multi-ethnic grocery store where we buy our regular kimchi also what's labeled "vegetarian" kimchi. So if you're someone who isn't inclined to make your own, don't despair until you've searched for commercial vegetarian kimchi--it exists.