Doing It Yourself
While I was in college I began cooking for myself. And that is where the fascination really began to take hold. And the questions. The most important one was: why my cooking tasted nothing like what I was eating in the restaurants? It was obvious that there was much I needed to learn about the ingredients, and different cooking methods. But for my age, I was already comfortable in the kitchen, having gained some cooking experience while growing up. So I persevered. Eventually I found one recipe that I was happy with. Then the question got turned on its head: why don’t the restaurants serve this?
My initial success set off some of my early cooking adventures which included: trying to recreate restaurant-style onion chutney, developing a fiery vindaloo and attempting to make puri at home. I began to visit local Indian grocery stores which would inevitably lead to the same quizzical question from the store clerk: “Can I help you find something?” Did I look like I needed help? Maybe to them, I looked like a musician who had stumbled into the store by mistake and was puzzled. Mesmerized was the better word.
It would take many years of trial, error and practice to finally get it. Along the way my interest would wax and wane and there even came a point where I was about to admit to myself that I had come as far as I was going to go. However, I had added a promising book to my collection, and I thought, “That’s it. If this doesn’t do it, then I’m done.”

This time, however, I read the introduction to the spices and cooking techniques carefully, and a few light bulbs lit up. There was something about this book that caused me to re-examine everything I had been doing — wrong, as it turns out. I finally realized that some of the shortcuts and simple substitutions I had been making were hurting the finished product. I began to understand why certain techniques like roasting whole spices (and probably not in a toaster oven) before grinding them made such a difference.
From that point on my cooking noticeably improved, and I began to crawl the web more frequently in search of knowledge, recipes and new ideas. Between the blogs, recipe sites and VahRehVah there was an abundance of information online, and much to learn. It was partially through this research that I began to learn about the regional, cultural and religious differences that provide such a huge diversity in the food.
Even with that great leap forward, I still had much to learn, and periodically, I would arrive at roadblocks that would take me weeks to resolve. Such is the case when I became convinced that something I was doing with garlic was giving all my dishes a “metallic” taste. I tried many different things, but the problem persisted. One day, I tried using a different pot while cooking and like magic, there was no metallic taste! It turns out that I had damaged the coating of my anodized aluminum pot and that was causing the taste.
As I worked around each roadblock my cooking would improve. Sometimes I would analyze a dish asking (OK, obsessing) if it was too hot, or too salty and tweak a recipe accordingly. Recently, however I came to realize I was starting to cook more by intuition than strictly by the recipe. I didn’t have to stand over the onions but rather could hear when they were starting to stick to the pan and needed to be stirred. I can sense if spices are about to burn (a pet peeve of mine!) and now know the optimal heat to allow a masala to cook just enough for the oil to “leave the sides.”