Musings: what I've learned, what I want to try

I've learned some important things about cooking from doing this blog.

1) The first is that you have to have good recipes. I adore Smitten Kitchen and the incomparably wonderful Skinnytaste.com for this reason. Nothing makes me so cross as spending money on lots of ingredients and following a recipe to the letter, only for it not to work. Quiches that won't set; dry, flavorless cakes; bland pasta sauces; etc etc. So I've learned that to be economical, I'm going to stick to tried and true recipes from sources that I know won't let me down, such as the sites mentioned above, Fine Cooking magazine, America's Test Kitchen, etc. I used to go to the library and check out recipe books, but I had so many bad experiences with certain celebrity TV chefs that I've stopped doing it.

2) How to bring out flavors. The above sources taught me a few things I hadn't known before. One is the use of a mirepoix. I've always been a fan of carrots and celery cut up raw as snacks, but who knew these humble vegetables could so drastically improve the flavor of pretty much any savory dish? They've transformed my tomato pasta sauce into something wonderful, and I use them all the time in casseroles and soups. Another thing I've learned is to use my homemade chicken broth in more recipes--Skinnytaste.com uses broth in the place of part of the milk for creamy sauces, for example--I absolutely love this, because it's a much more complex flavor than plain old béchamel. Another thing is to season as you go when cooking so that you flavor all the ingredients--a pinch of salt in your mirepoix before you add other things, and so on.

3) Not so much a thing I've learned as a thing I want to try. I want to learn how to make Indian food, because I don't really know how. I have a variety of "curries" that I make, but I suspect an Indian person would laugh their head off at my idea of what constitutes a curry. We don't have any Indian restaurants here, and I've been craving it recently. I'd like to learn to make a decent dhal, for example. I used to try to make it when I was a vegan in grad school, but it was always a bit bland no matter how much I tried to flavor it with spices. I'm looking around for a good website or recipe book. If anyone could suggest one, that'd be fabulous, thank you!