First off, you can blame the new layout for making me want to type. Second, you can blame yourself for actually reading.
I love to cook. I love creating things in my newer fancy big kitchen that came along with the new apartment. There are, however, a couple of issues that come along with this, as I will starkly outline below in proper format
1. I don’t really know how to cook.
a. While I enjoy the cooking and creating part, things sometimes turn out completely wrong. I season well, but I tend to sauce everything, and that’s just not right. The few dishes I have created all by myself that turned out fan-fucking-tastically, I don’t have the recipes for, because I don’t bother to write down what I’m doing.
2. Hence, sometimes things turn out really really horribly.
a. See case study 1, below
3. Or horribly horribly bland. Which the B will still eat without much complaint.
Case Study 1:
I regularly go to Asian food stores to get things like rice and Japanese curry. Once, I found a really interesting-looking curry that was contained within a plastic bag within a plastic container, on which many many things were written in (what I’m assuming was) Hindi. Now, I love my curry – I make it at home often, and I pretty much stick with the S & B kind that I’ve eaten since I was 5. I’m standing there, looking at this curry in this neat cup-deal with cool stuff written all over it, and decide it’s dinner.
!!Flash forward!! to that night, where I’m preparing curry like I normally do: chicken, carrots, broccoli, onion, whatever in a pot, and I’m about to add the curry that I purchased. I take my pair of scissors and cut open a corner; I taste a bit of the curry, and it seems fine. Now, since there are no instructions in English on the side of this container, I figure I should add about the same amount of curry mix as I always do, so I add about half the bag to the pot, mix it up, and put the lid on to simmer.
10 minutes later, I remove the lid to dish this stuff up, and immediately, my eyes start to water. “This is fantastic!†thought I, as both the B and myself love spicy food. I portion out some of the curry mixture on top of rice, hand a plate to the B, and he and myself head out to watch some computer while eating.
I sit down on the couch.
I take my first steaming bite of curry. At first, it’s too hot, so I do the huff-puff thing around the food in my mouth, trying to cool it down. I start chewing, and the first thing I notice is that the sauce is… well… salty. A lot salty. The second thing I notice, which takes a moment to make its way to my brain, is that my mouth is on fire. Fire with a capital “Fâ€, as in “Fuck! My. MOUTH. Is. On. FIRE!†I, of course, don’t say any of this out loud. Stoically, my lips pressed together, I look at the B, whose face is bright red, his eyes watering, his nose running, and smoke is pouring out of his ears. I ask quietly what he thinks of the food. What I receive in return is a plea for water, and he hands me his dish as I get up to go to the kitchen, the fear in his eyes as I remove the food from his sight is obvious. I bring him his water, and resolved not to have my mistake completely ruin dinner, I pick out the chicken on my plate, wipe off the curry as best as I can, and eat it.
And I can tell you what it is like to lick the sun – to stick my tongue out and give Mr. Light-Up-The-Blue-Sky a little bath. I opened my mouth, and invited the spiciest thing I have ever eaten into my mouth, and I chewed and I swallowed, and I lived to tell about it.
And I’ll promise you that that will never happen ever. Again.
Point: I should learn how to actually cook. And how to find directions about the curry I should only use 50 grams of, not half the bag, containing 400% more than I should have used, and how it should have been mixed with coconut milk. Or I could just learn to read hindi.
maybe it's just very spicy curry, regardless of how much you put in?
Posted by: j-a at February 14, 2005 6:41 AM