Family recipes are certain foods that remind us of warm feelings and happy memories with the ones we love. These can be foods our family always makes for celebrations and events and, more often, foods we enjoy eating together all the time.
Be ready to experiment, but experiment thoughtfully!
Recipes are a roadmap. You dont have to follow them exactly. Its OK to deviate.
But as you experiment and try new things, you want to make sure youre also listening to what your gut is telling you. When it comes to adding spices, Kalla says its always best to start with less and then add more as you go. Once youve added too much of a spice, its pretty much impossible to rectify it, because its already absorbed into your food. So the best practice is to go in slowly with the spices, and taste your product before you dive into making the rest of it. And as you keep adjusting and adding spices, taste it until you get the flavor you want, then stop! By doing this, youre training yourself to get better at tasting.
Kalla says, “You always have to make mistakes, because youll never forget them, so youll never repeat them. And this is the best thing I learned as a chef and as a cook — is that mistakes are always good, because they will show you how to not do it again next time.”
Throw your expectations out the window. Do NOT expect that your dish will be the same as the one you grew up eating, and don’t even try comparing!
Kalla says comparison is a killer and it will make you lose your confidence. Even if youve been a professional chef for years, the reality is that your food will never taste like your moms or grandmas. Thats because its not your moms or grandmas: what youre making is your own. Everybody has their own touch.
The goal isnt perfection, and we shouldnt only celebrate a perfect dish.
We should celebrate the preparation, the energy, the effort, the memories — everything it took to create the dish.
It’s So Delicious That I Cook For My Family Almost Every Dinner
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