The Conservativeness of Addiction

Ever go to a favorite restaurant and order the same thing every single time?

The CC is addicted to the pansoti at this particular restaurant. They are homemade ravioli stuffed with wild-greens (nettle, dandelion, borage, wild chard) and served with a garlicky, lip-smacking walnut sauce.

The rest of the menu is excellent but the CC succumbs to the inevitable every single time because you can't find this elsewhere.

This is a pattern. We stick to the familiar when we should really experiment. Particularly when we know that the quality of the product is likely to be amazing or even excellent.

Excellence breeds conservatism.

Especially when we don't get to the restaurant often or it's in a reasonably far-out place (read this post as to why that would happen.) We keep trying to recreate that first menu that blew our socks off when we really should be adventurous and try something else given that the absolute worst case is likely to be a "good" meal rather than an "amazing" meal.

The only logical explanation is when the restaurant is rather pricey in which case the CC supposes that people are justified in being somewhat conservative. Even then his inner instinct argues for the opposite fully well knowing that he doesn't exactly always follow his own dictum.

The only solution that the CC has come up with is to dictate by fiat that nobody (including himself) will be ordering an old dish, and if they want to they can sit at a different table. When forced to, the denizens of the world find a creative solution. It works via a radical upending of the social structure but it's not always possible.

Anybody have any interesting ideas on how to approach the problem a little more creatively?

Petai

The CC went to a Malaysian restaurant where a dish called sambal petai caught his eye. It was described as made with "Malaysian peas" but had a note: "please consult the server before you order".

Needless to say instructions like that are catnip for the CC, and when asked, the waitress replied that they were "peas" that were bitter and warned us. Needless to say, the CC felt compelled to order the dish. (Of course, later when we told the waitress that we loved the dish, she beamed at us with great fondness and pride as if she had known all along that we would love it.)

They were not "peas" of course but a species of bean called parkia speciosa. The colloquial name seems to be "stink bean" which seems a bit unfair because there was nothing stinky about it. Of course, it had been stir-fried with the very strong shrimp paste in a sweet-sour-umami sauce along with other veggies and shrimp. (The sourness came from tamarind.)

The taste is best described as slightly bitter with an astringent component. They are decidedly an acquired taste (what bitter food including beer isn't?) but quite delicious.

Recycling your leftovers

The original rice
The same thing stir-fried a few days later (after the rice has "dried out") with some eggs.

And that is how you waste precious little, my fellow depression-istas!

Just Pregnant with Possibilities

The world continues to amaze the CC.

It's a Japanese (who else?) soft-drink made from "horse placenta". Two varieties - orange and black. The black one is "more concentrated" because it is harvested "while the afterbirth is still potent."

It has all kinds of supposed "good" qualities - and will set you back $50 and $300 respectively.

Even the CC is feeling just the tiniest bit squeamish.

Laziness

Everyone is too lazy to cook sometimes. That's when the twin forces of laziness and the need for good food collide. Thankfully, in the CC's case, the latter always wins. And those are the times to get back to the basics.

Since, this is a post about laziness, first read this about technique.

Then, the basic concept is "loosely cooked rice" stir-fried with cumin, vegetables (carrots, peas, corn) and cashews.

If you can't grasp the recipe, read the archives.

Peace, man!

Vegetable Pulao with Cumin

Grilling Tandoori Chicken

The general recipe has been posted here.

The CC works his ass off, and people want originality but they don't bother reading all the good stuff that has been published before.

Of such laziness is a readership made!

Hash Browns and Scrambled Eggs

There is only one trick to making successful hash browns. You need extraordinarily dry potatoes where the cells are broken to remove the moisture.

To that end, you must first grate the potatoes and then wash them (to remove surface starch.) Then you need to squeeze them until they are dry. Then place them between towels, and squeeze them with a rolling pin to squeeze out even more liquid. Then squeeze them again.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Then, squeeze some more!

Then put them in a very hot skillet with oil and fry. Spread them in an extraordinarily thin layer, and press periodically with a spatula. Only if they are really dry, are you going to be able to do the successful "omelette" flip.

(For less dexterous people, slide it onto a plate, invert onto another plate and slide it back into the hot skillet. This is safe, efficient and guaranteed to succeed.)

For instructions on scrambled eggs, read here.

Making Hash Browns

(Source: xkcd.)

Creating Novelty

Long before, the advent of "nouvelle cuisine", the grandmas of virtually every cuisine in the world were technically adept at creating novelty out of nowhere.

Faced with the seasonality of ingredients, how do you create "interesting" food day after day after day, in a world where the airplane and refrigeration had yet to be invented, and the audience (as always) craved novelty?

The answer is shockingly simple - vary the proportion of spices.

You can serve the meat with more black pepper than ginger, and vice versa, and bingo! they taste different.

And since this scales exponentially in the number of ingredients (Ed: math geek alert!), this is a game that the grandmas were good at, and doggone it, they were not playing for mere stakes, they were playing to win!

Which brings us to the present. Multiple recipes for the same idea. Whenever the CC posts a classic spice recipe, there is a hangover that follows ("my family does it differently.")

Well, DUH!!!! Of course, they do. Which doesn't make it more "authentic". It just makes it as the baseline against which you compare.

The CC once made string beans with a classic North-Indian twist. Stir-fried with ajwain and cumin. The audience just pushed it away.

"This is not how I conceptualize string beans."

Total abject failure. Not one would eat it.

"Where's the coconut milk?", said one, his Asian roots showing.

Anyway, to get back to the subject before yet another post about the dubiousness of "authenticity" surfaces, back in the day, they made these spices in industrial-strength sizes. We are a little more circumspect, and need to tone it down a bit as explained by this post.

So when the next need to complain about "authenticity" arises, why not just lie down until it goes away?

Dinner Menu

Chole à la "Kwality's"
♦
Sukke with brussel sprouts, broccoli rabe and carrots
♦
Parathas

Breakfast chez le CC

Tomato fried rice

I ♥ Kuhn-Rikon

The most expensive piece of equipment in the CC's kitchen. The Rolls-Royce of pressure cookers which you may only pry away from the CC out of his "cold dead hands".

Adminis-trivia

The CC has had a hard-drive crash (quite a bit of picture loss) and is coincidentally down with a nasty cold but he'll be back.