Taste of India – Albuquerque, New Mexico
“Don’t go and cook Indian food if you never cooked Indian food, you know?” ~Wolfgang Puck Those who can’t do, write. The pan is mightier than the pen. Pick your aphorism. When it comes to cooking Indian food, both certainly apply in my case. Every effort to prepare even the most basic of Indian dishes is a painful reminiscence of the Chemistry courses which confounded, confused and frustrated me in equal measure. Sure, covalent bonds made sense (because they were easy), but the math-based system of writing complex chemical equations may as well have been Klingonese. So, too, are most recipes for Indian dishes. Yes, a passable phalanx of premixed “instant” Indian food exists, but what’s the fun in preparing that? Aspiring Indian food cooks (and masochists like me) prefer to prepare everything from scratch. That includes grinding and roasting ingredients for our own garam masala, an essential Indian spice mix which Epicurious considers “the Indian equivalent of French herbes de Provence or Chinese five-spice powder.” Somehow, my mix always has the taste appeal of a lethal bleach and ammonia combination. After years of trial and failure, I’ve arrived at the painful realization that I may never be able to…
