Posted by Jim at January 26th, 2006

I like food from India. It’s one of the things that got me interested in cooking ethnic foods. I’ve got a very basic understanding of the different cooking styles connected with different regions of the country.

This doesn’t stop me from screwing up every so often.

Yesterday I decided I would cook two dishes. One was basically fish in yogurt sauce. The other was cauliflower and scallions with black mustard seeds.

I’d managed to find black mustard seeds at a local store that specializes in middle eastern foods and I’d been wanting to find a way to use them. They turn out to be a little harder to use than I’d assumed. Basically what you’re supposed to do with mustard seeds is to heat oil to high, put the mustard seeds in, and wait for them to heat up and probably pop.

They never popped for me.

They just sat there, released their smell, and did nothing else. Mind you, I waited for them to pop. I waited while the edges of the oil blackened, began to smoke, and the smell became unbearably nasty. The air in the kitchen became hazy and everyone in the family began to cough.

According to the cookbook, I was supposed to wait for the seeds to turn grey before I put in the rest of the spices.

The seeds stayed black.

After several agonizing minutes, I gave up and dumped in the rest of the spices and turned on the ceiling fan. In the meantime, the pan that I’d been cooking the fish in had developed a dark, black crust that covered the pan. This isn’t as bad as it sounds because the fish was okay. It’s just that it had been dipped in flour, allowing the flour to combine with oil, making the crust nearly impenetrable.

Now, more than 24 hours later, the pans still soak in our sink and the house reeks of a smell like burned popcorn combined with mustard.

I shouldn’t complain. The food actually turned out okay.