What do I know about spices and herbs? I know when I was a child, they all seemed to give some convoluted combination of tastes, rather than a simple sweet, salty or sour. So, herbs and spices, with spices more so than herbs, got relegated to the taste category that my juvenile taste buds could understand - bitter. I had no idea that they would one day become an important part of my journey to better myself in creating deliciousness.
Italian food is not just renowned for containing abundance of garlic and onion, but herbs too. Their recipes introduced me to a whole new world of taste through the use of herbs. Adding flat leaf parsley to your pasta, or simmering a meat sauce with oregano, for example, is simple enough, but it brings a dish to life. I would liken it to a vase of flowers or pot of plant to a living space.
As many challenges as there are still awaiting in the same type of food, we all need a change sometimes. Cooking tasty food was still a big deal and a huge quest for me, if you remember what motivated me to embark on this journey in the first place. Italian food is like my first love in this journey. But it was an inevitable eventuality - I had to move on to further my cause. It's not really goodbye. We will always have pasta.
Curry! Who could deny that an Indian curry is like an explosion of tastes and an epitome of utilizing spices and herbs too. My husband and I love this butter chicken dish from our most frequented little local Indian restaurant. Naturally, numerous experiments ensued in attempts to recreate the dish in my own kitchen.
At the beginning of the pursuit, the more recipes I read the more I was convinced that this one recipe titled "best butter chicken" must be it. Its ingredients list contained quite a number of different spices, and most importantly it listed butter, lots of it! Well, it is butter chicken after all.
Marinating the meat, coating them in all the spices, tomato paste and yogurt alone looked delicious. It looked promising. When I fried the spice paste and sautéed the onion and chicken, the fragrance was powerful, exciting, and reassuring. Cream was called for, thus allaying any doubt of a creamy result. But by the time the sauce was made up, before the chicken had a simmer, a little sampling suggested that this butter chicken ship might have sailed off course.
The produced dish had a magnificent complex taste, distinctly of a lot of spices, and bore absolutely no resemblance to the restaurant dish we love. The restaurant dish had a much more subtle taste in spices but was much thicker, more velvety and simply delicious.
The recipe said to stir in extra butter at the end. Perhaps, it needed more butter to give the thickness and smoothness of the restaurant version, so I thought to myself. I stirred in more butter, and tasted, and stirred in more butter, and tasted... I must have added 3 times the recipe's amount of saturated fat to the dish, to no avail. I gave up. We had a bowl of overloaded spicy heart-attack, with tight shrunk chunks of insipid chicken swimming in the watery cream solution. I still relive the jumble of disappointment, bewilderment, remorse and contentment whenever the memory of that fateful night resurfaces. Remorse - because of feeding my husband the unhealthy horrible food. Contentment - because I have such a wonderfully supportive husband who would eat the inedible horror just because I cooked it.
I guess we are particularly affected by criticism in our everyday life. It is a basic mechanism we humans have developed for survival - avoid pain or danger. But how high is the bar we subconsciously set for ourselves as a result, just to prove ourselves? I think my choice of recipe might have been substantially influenced by the need for overtly impressive taste. Hopefully, my husband didn't think it was some kind of punishment.
At the end of the day, a recipe is simply a means to consistently reproducing a dish for a specific palate. The number of different recipes from the different regional Indian cuisines that exist for the same dish, is sufficient testimony. Perhaps, one day our palate will grow up some more to enjoy vast convoluted mix of spices in abundance.