Cooking Indian food and messing up
Setting: 23rd century, Earth (Star Trek reboot universe)
Summary: Character A (who has zero experience with cooking or making food from scratch, including even "I saw my parents do this") wants to cook a nice dinner for his love interest and proceeds to completely mess up the whole thing.
Previous research: Indian food recipes, forum posts on kitchen disasters/mistakes, personal experience
The menu I've settled on includes:
- chickpea soup (400 g canned chickpeas, 2 shallots, 2 peeled tomatoes, 200 g. basmati rice, 1 lime, parsley, curry, olive oil, salt)
- chicken curry (2 cloves of garlic, 2 onions, 2 apples, 3 tomatoes, 2 carrots, 1 green bell pepper, 2 zucchini, vegetable broth, 800 g. chicken breast, olive oil, salt, pepper)
Now, how could an inexperienced cook mess it up even when trying to follow the recipe? (Not that it would matter, I've noticed some recipes do not include obvious steps)
All I've come up with is:
chickpea soup: use dried chickpeas (as they are, without letting them rest in water for the requisite 12 hours), overcooking the rice (any idea on what happens to basmati rice when it's overcooked?)
chicken curry: buys frozen chicken and doesn't thaw it first (should result in half-cooked chicken), adds salt to the vegetable broth (not knowing it's already salty)
Does it sound believable? Is it messed up enough? Other ideas for how things could go wrong?
.
Summary: Character A (who has zero experience with cooking or making food from scratch, including even "I saw my parents do this") wants to cook a nice dinner for his love interest and proceeds to completely mess up the whole thing.
Previous research: Indian food recipes, forum posts on kitchen disasters/mistakes, personal experience
The menu I've settled on includes:
- chickpea soup (400 g canned chickpeas, 2 shallots, 2 peeled tomatoes, 200 g. basmati rice, 1 lime, parsley, curry, olive oil, salt)
- chicken curry (2 cloves of garlic, 2 onions, 2 apples, 3 tomatoes, 2 carrots, 1 green bell pepper, 2 zucchini, vegetable broth, 800 g. chicken breast, olive oil, salt, pepper)
Now, how could an inexperienced cook mess it up even when trying to follow the recipe? (Not that it would matter, I've noticed some recipes do not include obvious steps)
All I've come up with is:
chickpea soup: use dried chickpeas (as they are, without letting them rest in water for the requisite 12 hours), overcooking the rice (any idea on what happens to basmati rice when it's overcooked?)
chicken curry: buys frozen chicken and doesn't thaw it first (should result in half-cooked chicken), adds salt to the vegetable broth (not knowing it's already salty)
Does it sound believable? Is it messed up enough? Other ideas for how things could go wrong?
.