Practice makes perfect

This is going to sound obvious, but sometimes the best way for me to improve my cooking is to just keep doing it. In graduate school, I decided that I'd like to make really good chocolate mousse, so I just kept making it, week after week, until it was consistently just right. (After all, even poorly executed chocolate mousse is no great hardship to eat.)

When I moved to Miami, I inadvertently improved my pasta making skills. I liked eating homemade pasta, no one (aka my husband) was around to ask for variety, so I just ate fresh pasta and marinara sauce every night. I've discovered that I can make a large batch at once and freeze individual portions, so it's not as much work as it seems. And since I've made the dough a dozen times, I know exactly what the texture should be, how long it needs to be kneaded in the mixer, and even how to simultaneously feed dough into pasta machine, turn the crank, and pull it out (without growing a third arm).

So I was thinking that I'd like to get better at Indian cooking. I love to eat Indian, but cooking a meal always seems like an all-day affair. Partly that's because when I like Indian buffets - I want the bread, and the raita, and a couple of curries, and some rice and dal. And then I'm too tired to eat what I've made. But it might also be that I'm just not sufficiently familiar with Indian cuisine, and that I could get faster with practice. So I've vowed to make two Indian dishes a week, which will conveniently make up my school lunches. (And I can keep eating pasta for dinner every night.)

This week's attempts were aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower) and eggplant cashew rice. They were both good, but the eggplant rice was better, because it had a range of textures. I always think of Indian food being quite heavy, but if you stay away from both paneer and cream-sauce dishes, as I did this week, it turns out that you don't get enough calories. I've been hungry every afternoon. I guess a little more ghee wouldn't go amiss.