The Yellow House

I did my first, real-deal season-extending gardening this year. This means that as opposed to planting things in the spring, I actually planted them in October and protected them as they slowly grew through the winter. By the time spring rolled around, we had mature lettuce and leafy greens earlier in the year than we’ve ever had them before, which is great, in some ways, but has also started to weird me out a little. We tend to think of leafy things as tender, young, springy food, but the lettuce I am harvesting is eight months old. Kind of crazy, right?

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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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