domarzione | not that kind of test

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not that kind of test

This is the recipe I'm making for dinner tonight: Spicy Chickpea and Sour Tomato Curry with Noodles. (Yes, it's 9pm and I'm still making dinner.)

I am, to be completely immodest, a very good cook. I consider the recipe oddly written, but extremely easy to follow. The oddness throws me a little, though, which is why I'm putting it up here.

The first step is 'caramelize the onions' in a lot more words. It has a description of what's supposed to happen, more or less, but no sense of how long it should take beyond "a while" and leaves the end state at "browned to your liking."

The second step has the similarly unhelpful "let the sauce simmer."

I know caramelizing onions takes a half-hour or so and what kind of brown it's supposed to be and I have a good sense of how long a simmer it would need for the flavors to meld, since that's the point of that action. But if you are not familiar with these processes or if you are just starting to stretch your culinary wings, does this kind of instruction make things easier or just anxiety-inducing because it's so laid-back and vague?

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All of the above.

All of the above as in it's easier *and* you are absolutely calling the Butterball Hotline to figure out how to make this work? :)

All of the above in that it's not telling you how to lay a fire or where in the ice box to set some step nor is it giving times or measurements.

Audience. Cook books need to know their audience. And audiences have to adapt to heritage cookbooks. (Lots of good historical evidence in a cookbook. Butcher charts, things you can learn about...)

It's an interestingly written recipe. The tone is geared toward the beginning cook (caramelized onions take time, don't rush this process) but there is very little actual instruction given. As a new cook it would have driven me crazy not to have a sense of how long each step would take. Now I don't need the timings but I find the recipe's 'relax it will be ok,' attitude rather annoying. But the meal itself sounds yummy - you'll have to let us know how it turns out!

I went slightly off-script -- I used a big can of whole peeled tomatoes instead of sauce, I went nuts with the tamarind because there's never too much tamarind, I added a little jaggery to give it an extra note -- but it's definitely a keeper. I think it will actually be better tomorrow once everything settles, like chili. And I used little wheel pasta and I thought it worked better than long noodles.

I'm all in favor of whole tomatoes over sauce - I like the added texture.

I cook decently because I have been doing it almost daily for over two decades (as long as it's vegetarian, as I became vegetarian before truly starting to cook), but usually not fussy stuff nor with exotic (to me) incredients. It's just not worth the bother, and I still find vague instructions annoying. There should be at least a time range how long you should expect a step to take, along with a description what the results are supposed to be like at the end (e.g. whether it should thicken significantly or not).

Like, if I tried this recipe, which I won't because I'm not going to track down tamarind paste, I wouldn't know what to except from said tamarind paste which I have never cooked with or identified in a restaurant dish, so how am I supposed to know how much simmering it needs before it approximately tastes as it should just by taste testing?

Tamarind paste is pretty easy to find, for the record, and just adds a fruity sour note. It's used in Indian, Southeast Asian, and Latino cuisines, so you might have had it without realizing it. But I appreciate the reluctance.

Often things that are apparently common in the US are hard to find here. Like, I still remember one time I wanted to make some Moroccan inspired stew somebody had linked to on my flist and that used some kind of lemon preserved in salt brine or such, and no regular supermarket had it (though one apparently used to sell it at one point since their online page listed it in principle, only none of their stores had it) nor the Turkish grocery store where I can usually find Middle Eastern stuff, nor the Arabic grocery store I tried, before I finally gave up. I suppose with more effort I might have found it at a different Arabic grocery store, which are fairly common here, but without being sure that it would be available it seemed too much work to try random stores

And I have never noticed tamaraind paste in any of the three regular German grocery stores I use, though if it's truly common in India I expect I could find it in the Indian/Pakistani grocery store I use occasionally for stuff. My problem is more that unless I've come across multiple recipes using something special, more often than not it goes bad on me before I used it all, after going to some effort to find it for that one thing, and that always seems such a waste.

I have a jar of preserved lemons in my fridge, but I made them from scratch myself because they are harder to find than they should be. Apparently this is because everyone who uses them regularly makes them at home and demand is low, which I think is spurious reasoning.

And here is where I confess that my tamarind paste jars are usually years past their so-called expiry dates -- it's not something that goes bad.

But, yes, buying something you don't normally use when you only need a tidbit of it is absolutely a waste. A cookbook author I respect calls these recipes "a quarter of a quail egg" recipes and tries not to write those sorts. It's why I rarely make Ottolenghi recipes -- they all have fifteen ingredients, five of which you'll never use again.

Yeah, googling told me they were easy to make but you have to let them sit for quite a while, so not so great if you just want to try out a recipe. I actually did try the lemon preservation myself, because after failing to find them I was curious enough. And some months later I tried the stew recipe. Though I wasn't entirely sure whether my lemons had turned out the way they were supposed to be. Either way the stew didn't impress me and then I had the rest of those lemons sitting in my kitchen for a while without any idea what else I might use them for.

Since I'm not a good cook, and get anxious when confronted with unfamiliar situations, this kind of recipe is quite helpful! I like the completeness of the instructions about how to caramelize the onions. I also love it when recipes have comments (as this one does) that might add helpful tips. There was one that said something about adding a pinch of sugar if you don't care for the sourness. I might make this!

Reading the comments on recipes is so helpful. Not the ones who change everything and then complain, but when everyone agrees that you need to cut back on the sugar or the cooking time is wrong or whatever, those are great.

But as a less-comfortable cook, would you even suspect that the onions could take half an hour or more depending on your cookware? Would it make you nervous not to see brown after fifteen minutes? Or would you just do it until they got soft and call it good?

I think it would be better if the recipe gave some estimate of time, yes! So even more information is better. I like that it tells you approx how often to stir, and that it will take time, but an estimate is very helpful.

That's a lot of words, especially since the ones I would have needed would have been "it takes half an hour, go get a book you can hold with one hand so you don't get bored". So, I'm leaning towards anxiety-inducing.

I do best when I either know what the recipe is supposed to taste/look like when complete or there are specific time/temperature instructions. I'm thinking of the time a roommate bought collard greens by mistake, in place of kale. Or the time I tried to make mochi without ever having eaten it or seen a picture.

I think it's very brave of you to do something like try to make mochi without any context. I mean that completely seriously and without irony. It might have been a less-than-success, but darn it, you tried something out of your wheelhouse because the idea interested you. We should all do that.

Aw, thank you.

The first time I ended up actually eating it was after I finally ended up in Japan and my neighbor took me to the dedication of a new shrine, where they were throwing mochi from the roof. Major culinary "AH HA" moment. So much squishier than anticipated...

Next up: go to an Asian supermarket and get the mochi filled with ice cream. (I recommend red bean and green tea.)

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not that kind of test

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