Today, I brought my own food to work: rice with red lentils, peas, unsweetened peanut butter and some black caraway seeds (+ normal caraway, vegetable broth, a little vinegar)
And yeah, as I'm telling people this, I realize that they probably want to hear a recipe name, like "risotto" or "rice curry", but I have no idea what it is. I started cooking with rice and red lentils, kind of like a curry, but then the rest just happened spontaneously.
It always feels like I've discovered this great secret that you can just combine edible things and it generally leads to something edible.
You mean, you decided to prove the point of the parent comment... 🙃
It probably is hard to imagine from a list of ingredients, for example the vegetable broth was for boiling the rice+lentils, it wasn't soggy rice, and I only added the vinegar, because I accidentally made it too salty, so you weren't supposed to taste it much.
But yeah, aside from that, the taste wasn't too extravagant. Maybe replace the black caraway, if you're not me, but then it actually tasted quite a lot like egg after leaving it in the fridge over night.
Seriously. Not even experimenting, but just looking at other cultures' cuisines as a start. In the states we barely even pickle things that aren't cucumbers. The seafood situation in the middle of the country is nothing compared to the coasts, and what's acceptable on the coasts is a fraction of what gets eaten in Iceland or Japan.
People generally don't want to expand their palates. Anyone who wants to try new things can look to countless dishes around the world they've never even heard of.