Lesson learned - Always follow the recipe

Although I am not a cooking aficionado,  I love virtually gratifying my palate by browsing through the culinary blogs and looking at the captivating pictures of all those gastronomic delights. Also, my favorite TV show during college was MasterChef Australia in Star world, where amateur cooks create marvelous mouth watering dishes that fill me with a strong drive to get into the kitchen and start cooking at the very moment. It was at the peak of the motivation to be an expert in culinary crafts that I created a blog named 'Platter Express' two years ago  to compile all my cooking experiences. As the great chef in the movie 'Ratatoullie' says "Anyone can cook!" then why not me? But, unfortunately I have not taken another step  forward in the direction to fulfill my dream. So, the blog still remains in a state of  hibernation without even a single post to its credit.

As Mummy/Papa left for India two weeks back, the ownership of the kitchen was temporarily transferred to me and it has been my mini-experiment lab for the last few days. The most valuable lesson I learned is never improvise and stream in my naive ideas into the recipe and spoil the dish. I must wait until I learn the basic lessons of cooking,the fine art of  balancing salt,spice and the rest of the ingredients  before I try out my own twists to the recipe. I followed this principle to the very end when I cooked the Kadala curry yesterday. The dish turned out to be  quite okay until towards the end when I got this splendid idea to make the dish even more outstanding. I took the left over Coconut Chutney from the fridge and poured it into the curry. I was strongly convinced  that this would elevate the status of the dish from a mediocre one to something smashing and superior, a Thai-South Indian hybrid, I told myself. Alas,that was the brutal end to a palatable,innocent curry. It tasted really bad, I tried saving it by adding more coriander and chilly powder which unfortunately didn't bring any remarkable change. I  was really hungry as I was planning to have my breakfast after preparing the curry and hence I somehow managed to gulp  it down along with the puttu. The pangs of hunger masked the horrible taste. Today morning the dish landed in the trash because not only did it taste bad, but it also seemed to be spoiled, maybe because of the left over secret ingredient that was added to it in the end.

Lesson reinforced -Always stick to the recipe :-)