Paulie had a lot of Lamb
Reporting back on yesterday’s Lamb Curry recipe.
It was good. Damn, damn good. Epic.
Only one problem: I should have cooked more. Don’t get me wrong, I did enough for three adults. The fact is, I should have done enough for two adults and big, fat, greedy eating machine, AKA me.
No doubt a purist or two will see several acts of wanton sacrilege in curry terms, but you know what? I don’t care. There’s too much up-arsishness about food these days. There is in fact no right and no wrong unless what you’ve cooked tastes terrible. Or if its a baking thing where erring from the path of the righteous recipe can leave you with a biscuit instead of a nice, fluffy cake.
Have a look, drop a comment, send me a recipe…
Yes, you can stray from the paths of righteousness when you bake. If you know your techniques you can fiddle around with recipes to get the results you want – not to the same extent that you can with cooking. When I bake with yeast, I throw the ingredients around with almost the same abandon that I do when cooking, but still weigh and measure carefully when making cakes with baking powder or bicarb as a raising agent. If however, I think that the mixture is too dry, I feel comfortable sloshing in a bit more milk or more flour if the mixture looks too sloppy. It’s all a matter of experience and judgement, as is cooking.
Getting up one’s own arse and getting prissy over food is pointless. The criteria are; does it taste good, does it look good without being too damn fussy – eye appeal is important, but life is too short to create edible sculptures. I do make a point of arranging food attractively, it’s instinctive, but fall short of fussing too much. People should feel comfortable to just tuck in.
Have sometimes done very formal decoration, salmon coated with chaud-froid sauce and tarted up with aspic and bits of cucumber was one example, and then had people completely avoid the dish because it looks to pretty (prissy) to just help themselves. That is not the object.
To get back to the point and re-iterate what Paul says, there are no right ways and wrong ways. If you dont have one ingredient, substitute another, if you feel like seasoning differently, do so. And dont get nervous – just taste as you go along.