Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

A primary goal of this blog is to share with you the techniques in detail that I have come up with to make Asian Cuisine work for the home chef.  I have a lot of cookbooks, and to be honest a lot of them contain instructions which are simply ridiculous.  Stir-fry is a great example, and possibly the one that gives home cooks the most trouble.  I am not sure if it is arrogance or simple ignorance, but as far as I can tell, many formally trained pro chefs don’t know how to actually cook at home.  This attitude is exemplified on the food porn which has permeated TV over the past decade.  Every ingredient is available (and pre-diced!) and dozens of pots and pans (all of them gleaming All-Clads) the walls.  You can make as big a mess as possible because who doesn’t have a dishwasher?  Some kind of vagrant?  The stove is ten times hotter than what a normal person has – and of course it is always, always gas.  In fact, it is almost as if having an electric stove is like some kind of stigma, as if the home chef shows by having an electric stove that they aren’t serious enough about their little hobby, and should stick with frozen pizza and top ramen.  I am happy to tell you that when it comes to asian cuisine, an electric stove is in my opinion equivalent but different than gas.  Read the stir fry section to find out why.

Likewise, the home chef gets lumped into one of two categories: the one who wants to spend two days obsessing over crazy minutiae like removing the green parts from garlic or browning a whole chicken on the stove before roasting it (I guarantee it browns just fine with only the heat of the oven) or the frazzled working mom who has only 30 minutes a day to prepare a healthy meal.   I am happy to spend three days straight cooking (or three weeks if I can find the time), but I refuse to waste my energy on pointless steps usually dreamed up by long dead French chefs whom I believe suffered from some type of dementia due to the lead content of their wine bottles.  The time saved by pruning out pointless and over-challenging cooking steps can be applied to more important tasks such as (for example) the following:

1. Lavishing attention on a lovely woman
2. Planning the next days meal – for me this often entails taking a pack of meat or seafood out of the fridge and brining or marinating it.
3. Making stock from leftover bones
4. Preparing home made sauces that you can use for weeks to come
5. Adding dessert to the menu
6. Making a bread starter
7. Brewing beer
8. Making cheese
9. Jarring tomatoes
10. Starting seeds for your vegetable garden
11. Preparing and then drinking intricate cocktails 

This is just a first list of all the things you can do with the time you save by focusing on what really matters in your cooking.  The result will be a much more complex cuisine overall, although many of the dishes will be simple (if not always easy to prepare).  I simply do not understand the logic behind spending two days or more preparing a complex dish with a half dozen cooking steps (ahem cassoulet) that uses canned broth and tomatoes.  Spend your time making fresh broth, jarring tomatoes, and then just eat the confit on its own.  It isn’t that I dislike French Food particularly, it is just that I don’t have time for it.  Likewise, I am not interested in Cantonese banquet cooking where the chef spends hour carving flowers out of radishes or layering steamed vegetables to look like a dragon.  

I try to carry this attitude forward into the rest of my life.  A primary goal for the coming year is to strip unnecessary complexity and look for ways to treat myself to more and more time to grow and explore.  This is an example of how the same lessons that help us in the kitchen are also valuable in the rest of our life.    This is the primary message I hope to convey.  Think for example of the countless hours spent decorating a house with lights one week and removing them the next.  To my mind there are so many more ways to spend this time wisely, some of them listed above (especially #1).  Focus on what matters to you, not what someone else tells you is important.