You, a desert island, a complete kitchen, and five foods ...

Here's a thought experiment: you are stranded on a nice desert island that just happens to have an awesome kitchen full of enough equipment to turn any food ingredient into tasty snacks/meals. For example, tomatoes can be turned into ketchup, pizza sauce, or spaghetti sauce. (But if you want pizza or spaghetti, you would also need flour.)

You can five food ingredients from which to make your meals for the indefinite future. What five foods do you choose?

1) Salmon: I love burgers and turkey sandwiches, but cutting down to five foods pretty much means just one protein source, and I'm going with salmon. Lots of possibilities here, from sushi to fried salmon skin to lox to baked salmon. One of my favorite lunch items is to mix canned salmon and avocado for use as a sandwich spread.


2) Mango: Apparently, the mango is one of the most commonly eaten fruits in the world, but it's always seemed exotic to me, maybe because it's less common in the non-Hawaii part of the United States. Whatever, they fit the island theme. And they're delicious.


3) Avocado: Is the avocado a fruit or a vegetable? (I think there was a brief discussion of this in the George Hamilton flick "Zorro the Gay Blade"). It has a pit, so I guess that makes it a fruit, although it's commonly added to salads or as a garnishment on burgers. As noted above, I love mixing canned salmon and avocados as a sandwich spread. I'd need limes and onions to turn it into guacamole, so that's out, but I have tried avocado ice cream (although I guess that would require a dairy source, so that's out too). Anyway, I love avocados.


4) Potato: Some people think potatoes are the perfect food. I don't know if I'd go that far, but this one item offers French fries, tater tots, hash browns, mashed potatoes, and baked potatoes. Mmm, mashed potatoes....


5) Cauliflower: I debated long and hard about my last choice. I considered cheating and making the list six items, but that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. In the end, I decided a(nother) vegetable was more important than flour, notwithstanding the variety of items that flour could result in. Sometimes I think I could eat an entire meal of cauliflower.

What are your choices?