Week 2 - Turmeric

So last week, I was looking through my spices for spices, and I thought, “Turmeric. I’ve got this big jar of it, and really have no idea what the heck it is.” It goes in Indian food. That’s why I have it, and that’s pretty much the only thing I know about it.

Then I thought, “wait – don’t I have a blog for precisely this reason?”

I’m not joking, either. One of the advantages of having a terrible memory is that you occasionally surprise yourself like that.

Up until then, I had been spending a lot of time waffling about what I should do next. Should it be something else critical, along the lines of salt? Sugar? Pepper? (No. Very no. Week one took three weeks in large part because salt is an immense topic. I need to pick something that’s reasonable.) (And pepper is probably at least two weeks, maybe as much as a month – a week for black peppercorns, and then I’ll look and see if the other colors are deserving of weeks to themselves, or should just be handled en masse.)

At this point it seems like a good idea to get down to business as usual, or at least figure out what business as usual will be. This week I’m just gonna pick something nice and normal, cook a few dishes, make a few funny quips, and try not to get sucked in too deep. (Fair warning – if it turns out that, upon examination, turmeric is as rich in history and usage as salt, has as many variations and requires the same kind of in-depth understanding… I’m going to quit.)

I also like the idea of doing spices in themed groupings – so I’ll probably wind up, over the next few weeks, doing a bunch of the spices that are commonly used in Indian dishes, and trying out a bunch of Indian stuff, in addition to doing my best to find dishes that show off each spice’s individuality.
In a lot of cases, of course, there won't be a dish that really focuses on spices like, say, turmeric - because spices are usually used in conjunction with particular other spices, just like music tends to happen in chords, rather than individual notes.

I’m not going to cook anything for at least a day or two, because honestly – between the dinner on Friday and a birthday dinner we made last night (sushi for my friend Yousef’s thirty-fifth… I need to find a better source for sushi-grade fish around here, but all in all the meal was great) I’ve got to clear out some of these leftovers. But that gives me some time to figure out exactly what turmeric is, where it comes from, and what it does - as well as some thinking about how I can make sure this blog remains a reasonable amount of work for me, and a reasonable amount of reading for you.