As long as I’m contemplating updating my food blog again (having been so insistently nudged), is there anything specific people would like to see there?
Not a specific recipe but I’d be interested in a post about how to improvise in general. When you decide you want to make something and you see that you have a weird set of ingredients, how do you decide what to do? Similarly, how can you tell when it is ok to swap one spice with another? I for example have found empirically that recipes that use curry can work well with cumin and but the reverse doesn’t seem to go as well. Are there any general guidelines for that sort of thing?
(Regarding “curry” and cumin, curry powder isn’t actually a spice. It’s a spice blend, which usually contains cumin—so things that call for curry powder will taste fine if you put in cumin, since you were already going to put in cumin, but putting curry powder into something that calls for cumin entails putting in a bunch of extra stuff like turmeric that may not work.)
Not a specific recipe but I’d be interested in a post about how to improvise in general. When you decide you want to make something and you see that you have a weird set of ingredients, how do you decide what to do? Similarly, how can you tell when it is ok to swap one spice with another? I for example have found empirically that recipes that use curry can work well with cumin and but the reverse doesn’t seem to go as well. Are there any general guidelines for that sort of thing?
I wrote a little about this onsite, actually: Saturation, Distillation, Improvisation: A Story About Procedural Knowledge And Cookies
(Regarding “curry” and cumin, curry powder isn’t actually a spice. It’s a spice blend, which usually contains cumin—so things that call for curry powder will taste fine if you put in cumin, since you were already going to put in cumin, but putting curry powder into something that calls for cumin entails putting in a bunch of extra stuff like turmeric that may not work.)