Not the “HOW” but the “WHY” of cooking!

Watching cooking shows on television or reading cookery books gives you this sense of un-touch-ability about recipes. Along with it comes the sense where matters of food and taste become “this is how it is” and not “this is why it is so”. All this was true till I found Alton Brown and his book “I am just here for the Food”.

Few weeks back I borrowed this book from Tempe public Library. This is a geek’s cooking book, which takes you on a journey through cooking techniques. Basically various ways of applying heat to food stuff. This book is not for recipes, even though there are about 80 or so of them in this book, instead this is a book about technique. You learn why frying is like using a frying pan made out of the same stuff that the evil terminator in terminator 2 was made out of, or why two stapler pins in a microwave are the key to perfectly popped corn.

This was an interesting weekend with fair amount of cooking.
Started reading Alton brown again, made papad ki sabzi, to which I just might post my own recipe, heck I made it twice within a span of two hours,my own fresh potato chips. Yes I know deep fried, blah. Finally I tried Alton’s recipe for rice pilaf…mmm yeah! All of them shall be up sometime soon Don’t worry, in the meanwhile, you dear reader can be happy and secure in the knowledge that I continue to feed myself good tasty food every now and then.

And we had fresh cauliflower cooked in yogurt and ginger, arahar daal, with laccha paranthas and rice. Everything turned out quite nicely. I was quite pleased with the results. To top it all we had Dulce-de-lache Ice-cream, which I learnt from watching large amounts of pbs cooking shows.

Now let me emphasize on a specific vegetable which I hate with all my heart.
Many people would agree with me that Broccoli is one of the worst tasted vegetables we had ever had in India. The first time I saw Broccoli is, when I came to the U.S. In the beginning since it looked pretty I was tempted to buy it, but to my surprise the taste was horrible. Why I guess American kids hate it. I don’t know why these scientists felt the need of inventing Broccoli when we already had nice, tasty, yummy, good looking Cauliflower. So I have decided why would I even bother with the abomination that is Broccoli when I can get perfectly good florets of Cauliflower available any where.
I would like to read your opinion about any other disgusting vegetable you have ever tasted.