I realized that I never write about cooking, though it has been a source , relaxation, and enjoyment for me for years now. I love cooking, and trying to make new things. At some level its looking for an algorithm, given the functions aka spices and other ingredients,. We desire to cook up a concoction that tastes ... delicious. The (sometimes) easier goal is to reverse engineer -- come up with the right mixture and timing to recreate an entree that I have tasted somewhere. Now this taste might be something I have actually tried some place, or have just seen and smelled somwwhere, or in the hardest case just seen a picture and read a description. The second scenario is more interesting, and often fascinating -- mixing up ingredients on the fly to cook up something 'new', guessing the final taste and smell, and off we go. Often this leads to mediocre or bad entrees what are hard to chew down, but sometimes you hit a gem, and that makes up for all the previous failures. Sounds like a general ramble about life.
Yesterday, I tried to make some guava jelly. Its quite mind boggling to imagine the amount of trials and testing it took for whoever came up with the original recipe (I had an idea of what to expect having seen, years back, my mother making jelly ). Definitely not the obvious thing we feel like trying given an overripe fruit. The natural tendency would be to just chuck the fruit. But definitely someone was more adventurous. Quite late into the process, say 15minutes into cooking the real fun happens --- within a very short time the liquid changes consistency, very rapidly. If you have tried it yourself, or seen the process you know what I mean. That type of chemical reaction is so refreshing to witness. Of course in the end you have amazingly fresh jelly to enjoy, while trying to guess what variations one can bring about in the process to get a non-trivial end product. I realize the whole article got very geeky, contrary to what I wanted to put down. Sometimes the end results are hard to predict ;-)
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2 comments:
the jelly was really yuuummmmmmmmmmmy
There is a quote usually attributed to Elvis Costello, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Perhaps that's true for cooking, too...so that the only way left is to write about what it means to you. In that sense, this is successful...though I'm not sure if that makes it geeky or poetic
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