When I was about 10 years old, I embarked on my first culinary experiment: Ketchup Eggs and Hashbrowns. See, I reasoned that if I enjoyed ketchup on eggs and hashbrowns, then I could save myself the trouble of putting on the ketchup if I simply added it while the eggs and potatoes were cooking. I also had the bright idea of simply mixing in the eggs and hashbrowns together. Needless to say, the end result was something with questionable taste, terrible texture, and a less than presentable appearance. However, I DID finish my plate and am around to tell the tale, so it couldn’t have been all bad.
I’m happy to say that my skills have increased dramatically since then. They have been honed by years of cooking for myself and others: from family in Iran that humored me by letting me run rampant in their kitchens to roommates in college that were glad to eat my various feints at haute cuisine. I have since settled somewhere between haute and bas cuisine… I’d say mediu cuisine is my forte.
I love food. I love buying ingredients, I love the act of cooking, I love spicing food, I love the smells wafting from a perfectly seasoned dish, and of course, I love eating.
As far as my cooking “ethic,” the following are the most important to me:
- Taste – If it’s not delicious, why are we making it? Furthermore, who wants to eat something that’s not delicious?
- Texture – This goes part and parcel with the taste of a food, but so often I find that it’s ignored in recipes.
- Variety – I strive for different colors, tastes, and textures in each meal. My favorite meals are those where I can create many different interesting bites with permutations of the ingredients.
- Freshness – While my budget hardly allows me to splurge as much as I’d like (and splurge I do), I prefer everything to be fresh. In other words, you won’t see any powdered mashed potatoes here (though, as a friend of a friend once proclaimed loudly, “Mashed potatoes are arguably the most powderable of all foods!”
Trial and Error
I was going to add this to my list of cooking “ethics,” but it’s really the basis of my cooking and, to a greater extent, my life, so it gets its own section. The “Ketchup Eggs and Hashbrowns” was hardly my first error, nor will it be the last. My culinary adventures has been a comedy of errors, some too salty, some too sweet, a few inedible, but luckily none poisonous (so far). Even my first post is a testament to these errors. I plan on including all of them in here.
This also applies to the blog itself. I am learning PHP, brushing up on my CSS skills, and generally learning blog formatting as well. So, any tips, suggestions, or commentary is welcome on the blog, the recipes, the entries, etc. If there’s one thing I’ve made my peace with in life, it’s screwing up.