Cooking
I've been doing a lot of cooking lately, and getting more ambitious and more confident with it. I think I finally understand ingredients and techniques well enough to have a reasonably good idea of what substitutions will work the first time I try a new recipe, and I'm getting better at throwing something together with whatever's around. The result is that I've moved from using recipes to give me detailed instructions to looking for unfamiliar recipes to learn new ideas from, and some of the most satisfying cooking I've done lately has involved recipes I'll probably never exactly repeat, but will use bits of a lot. For example:
Michael Natkin's "Persian-Italian" eggplant stew is just the sort of thing I like coming up with, but I wanted to try his approach. I'll definitely make that sauce/seasoning combo again, but I found his technique for cooking eggplant a lot more work than mine, and I'm not convinced that part's worth the effort. And for the seasoning, I didn't want to buy mosto cotto specially so I substituted it with balsamic vinegar + sugar. No idea if it's a close replacement, but the end result was delicious so who cares.
Rick Stein's Nasi Goreng with mackerel taught me how to make nasi goreng paste, which I've previously just bought in jars. Now that I can make it myself, I can adjust the taste-I find the store bought ones a bit too fierce, but my first home-made one needed more garlic and chilli, and eventually I'll find the happy medium-but I needed guidance to get started. And I think I will keep using the "make ultra-thin omlettes instead of stirring raw egg directly into the fried rice" technique, because it gives the eggs a much nicer texture, but I don't plan on routinely following a precise recipe for fried rice. That's not in the spirit of the dish, anyway.
This has made me interested again in a challenge I thought of setting myself years ago, but always chickened out of: making some meals out of only foods that existed in the Americas before Europeans colonised and brought their kind of agriculture with them, or in the Old World before European colonists brought things (primarily nightshades) back. Just about all modern cuisines involve something that crossed the Atlantic in that period-like the eggplant, chillis and tomatoes in the recipes I just mentioned-but surely delicious food predates Columbus.... Now I just have to come up with some ideas and figure out where to confirm the origin of each food species. This may take a while, but I think I'm going to enjoy it.
Michael Natkin's "Persian-Italian" eggplant stew is just the sort of thing I like coming up with, but I wanted to try his approach. I'll definitely make that sauce/seasoning combo again, but I found his technique for cooking eggplant a lot more work than mine, and I'm not convinced that part's worth the effort. And for the seasoning, I didn't want to buy mosto cotto specially so I substituted it with balsamic vinegar + sugar. No idea if it's a close replacement, but the end result was delicious so who cares.
Rick Stein's Nasi Goreng with mackerel taught me how to make nasi goreng paste, which I've previously just bought in jars. Now that I can make it myself, I can adjust the taste-I find the store bought ones a bit too fierce, but my first home-made one needed more garlic and chilli, and eventually I'll find the happy medium-but I needed guidance to get started. And I think I will keep using the "make ultra-thin omlettes instead of stirring raw egg directly into the fried rice" technique, because it gives the eggs a much nicer texture, but I don't plan on routinely following a precise recipe for fried rice. That's not in the spirit of the dish, anyway.
This has made me interested again in a challenge I thought of setting myself years ago, but always chickened out of: making some meals out of only foods that existed in the Americas before Europeans colonised and brought their kind of agriculture with them, or in the Old World before European colonists brought things (primarily nightshades) back. Just about all modern cuisines involve something that crossed the Atlantic in that period-like the eggplant, chillis and tomatoes in the recipes I just mentioned-but surely delicious food predates Columbus.... Now I just have to come up with some ideas and figure out where to confirm the origin of each food species. This may take a while, but I think I'm going to enjoy it.