not that kind of test

[domarzione]

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?

Comments

[domarzione]

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.

[ratcreature]

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.

[domarzione]

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.

[ratcreature]

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.