The Yellow House

I love spicy food. I love Indian food. I love chilies and cumin and coriander and garlic and I love how often, in Indian cuisine, all that spice is topped off with a cool, tangy yogurt raita to take the edge off. But—and I know I’m not alone in this—I am very intimidated by Indian-style cooking.

Ingredient lists a mile long and potentially hard-to-find items are commonly-cited as reasons to avoid cooking many Indian dishes. But for me, the turn-off is that Indian cooking simply doesn’t come intuitively. Cooking for me is a pretty sensory and non-stressful experience. I fudge the amounts of ingredients. A lot. Louise and I recently joked that we just read the ingredients lists in recipes…or sometimes, only the recipe name itself. Yet I wasn’t raised cooking Indian food, and that intuition simply isn’t there.
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David Tanis famously opens his fantastic book, A Platter of Figs, by asking the question, “What makes a boy from Ohio,…raised on Tater Tots and Birds Eye, end up wanting to eat like a Greek peasant for breakfast, a French peasant for lunch, and a Moroccan peasant for dinner?”

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First blog posts are awkward. They usually come across as overly-sentimental or trying-too-hard. A lot of people in my life have been asking for this blog for a long time, either to see photos or get recipes (that I usually forget to email them when they request). I have a sneaking suspicion that the rest of the people who have wanted this blog would like me to have an outlet for my general rantings other than their ears. Which, I suppose, is legitimate. 

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