As anyone who loves to cook knows, sometimes our efforts go awry, and our creations go in the trash. We might be tempted to congratulate ourselves that we have never set the kitchen on fire or poisoned our guests, but our minor kitchen mishaps remind us that we still have a lot to learn.
This topic has been on my mind because I have been trying to make pad thai, and every attempt has been an abject failure. Sometimes there is too much sauce, and sometimes not enough. The bean sprouts are off, or the noodles are hard. It’s bland, or gummy, or just kinda meh. No matter what I do, my pad thai never tastes quite right. Fortunately, there are two Thai restaurants within walking distance, and so I have given myself permission to give up. And I’m not sorry! (And neither is my husband, Matt, who manfully ate all my attempts and has been too nice to say that he prefers the restaurant version too.)
Sadly, the pad thai is not my only recent food snafu. But before we get to the sad saga of the vegan cookbook, we need a digression:
The Narcissism of Small Differences
I am a vegetarian, so I probably shouldn’t say this, but I just don’t get veganism. I do agree that the suffering of animals in factory farms, the environmental threats of industrial farming, and the high injury rate of workers in meat-processing plants are terrible wrongs that we ought to oppose. But since it is possible—and increasingly easy—to buy eggs, dairy products, and even meat from ethical farms, why do without? Do vegans not miss such simple pleasures as a wedge of Brie, a schmeer of butter, a drizzle of honey, or a scoop of ice cream? Do they believe that ersatz milk concocted in a factory out of almonds, hemp, or what have you is healthier and ecologically superior to real milk fresh from the cow?
But maybe my anti-vegan snark shouldn’t be surprising. As Freud reminds us, “the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.”
Speaking of hypersensitivity to minor differences, here’s a joke, about the Jewish Robinson Crusoe:
A ship lands on a desert island, and who should come to greet the crew but Robinson Crusoe! He proudly shows the crew around his island, and they marvel at how well he has adapted to his solitary life. Then they see two identical buildings standing right next to each other. “What are those?” they ask. Crusoe replies, “Well, that building on the right is MY synagogue. And that other one over there?! That’s the OTHER synagogue. I wouldn’t be CAUGHT DEAD there!”1
Anyway, back to my sad saga. I do try to overcome my prejudices, including against veganism, and so a few months ago I bought a vegan cookbook that looked promising.2 The author is a disciple of one of my favorite chefs, Yotam Ottolenghi, and her dishes looked delectable. The book was quite expensive, so, in thrall to the sunk cost fallacy, I decided to get my money’s worth by cooking every recipe in the book, at the rate of one per week for a year.
Readers, I am sorry to report that while a few recipes are keepers, all of them are extremely labor-intensive, and most of them are, like my best attempts at pad thai, just kinda meh. In other words, not worth the trouble. You can eat only so many vegetable stews before you cry uncle. Which Matt did, a couple of weeks ago. He sampled that week’s offering, eggplant curry (I don’t even like eggplant!), looked me in the eye, and said, “You can just stop making these recipes, you know.” I had to acknowledge that he was right, so I quit. What a relief!
Leftovers and Revealed Preferences
Another food failure, another digression: Every month or so, Matt used to request lentil soup from the Fields of Greens cookbook, and I would duly make it. Unlike every other recipe in this wonderful cookbook, the lentil soup was fine, but not great. How do I know? Because there was always a lot left over, and it would sit in the fridge, untouched, for days until I finally threw it away.3 So I no longer make that particular lentil soup, and we don’t miss it one bit.
That leftover soup is an example of a revealed preference. We may say that we like something (the soup), but our behavior (eating everything else in the house rather than finishing up the soup) says otherwise. Revealed preferences pose a major problem for research that purports to draw valid conclusions from self-reported data. We may claim that we are health-conscious teetotalers, but what would our grocery- (and liquor-) store receipts say?
Or, to take another example, pundits love to characterize the US as a religious country, citing surveys in which more than two-thirds of Americans say they are religious. But only 20 percent of Americans attend religious services at least once a week (and because this statistic is also self-reported, the true percentage is probably much lower). WKRP in Cincinnati, a comedy beloved by Gen-Xers like me, once did an episode on this topic. In the video below, a TV crew shows up unexpectedly one Sunday morning at Herb Tarlek’s house. His wife claims that “On Sundays we go to church!” but the subsequent mad scramble, culminating in an attempt to enter a locked synagogue, reveals that the Tarlek family prefers a leisurely lie-in on Sunday mornings.4 (The sequence begins at the 4:30 mark.)
In fact, we’re all a bit like the Tarlek family, aren’t we? We sincerely intend to go to church, or cook vegan, or get fit, or put down our phones, or improve ourselves in some other way, but we fall short. And when that happens, I think we need to be more forgiving of our own and others’ failures.
But it also can’t hurt to try a thought experiment called the Alien of Shame: Imagine that an alien observes everything we do for a week. What would the alien say we value most? And what changes could we make to bring our actions more in line with our values?
How about you, readers? What is your worst food failure? Please share your thoughts—and embarrassing stories!—in the comments!
The Tidbit
I wrote about love languages a couple of weeks ago but neglected to mention one of the best ways of all to show we care: Teaching a friend how to do something cool. My friend Ha is a wonderful cook. Recently, she made green tofu curry and shared some with us, and it was so delicious that I asked for the recipe. She sent me a detailed list—with photos—of exactly which ingredients to get, and, once my Thai pantry was assembled, she came over to show me how to make the dish.
I am happy to report that Ha’s recipe is—literally—foolproof, because it turned out great even when I made it. In theory this dish serves four, but Matt and I ate up every bite snip snap. There were no leftovers.
Ha’s Green Tofu Curry
Note: Don’t be intimidated by the unfamiliar ingredients. Most of them can be found in the international aisle at your supermarket, and the more exotic items are available in Asian groceries or online. I’ve included links with more information on selecting, storing, and using these ingredients.
Ingredients
500ml/16oz (i.e. two small boxes or one can) full-fat coconut milk
about 2T green curry paste, depending on the heat of the paste and on your spice tolerance
about 2T fish sauce (Ha says there is no good vegetarian substitute; vegetarians can omit the fish sauce and add extra salt)
about 2T palm sugar (brown sugar is an ok substitute if you can’t find palm sugar)
4–6 Thai eggplants, stemmed and halved (if you can’t find these, just omit)
1 250gm/8oz package extra-firm tofu, cut into cubes
Thai basil and lime wedges for serving
Method
Pour half the coconut milk into a medium saucepan and heat to boiling.
Add the Kaffir lime leaves and curry paste. Cook, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon,5 until fragrant. Add fish sauce and sugar and continue cooking and stirring. Taste for seasoning and adjust as necessary.
Add in the eggplant, tofu, and remaining coconut milk. Turn down heat, cover pan, and cook until eggplant softens (about half an hour).
That’s it! So easy!
Serve the curry over jasmine rice (I like to cook the rice with a stalk of lemongrass) and garnish with Thai basil and a wedge of lime for squeezing over everything.
The narcissism of small differences afflicts all groups, not just us Jews (or, for that matter, inhabitants of desert islands). My mom grew up in a tiny town in northern Minnesota. The town had three hundred fifty people—and nine churches.
I am not going to name the cookbook, because I bear the author no ill will. She seems like a lovely person who is committed to making the world a better place.
You may be wondering why I didn’t just make a half recipe. Well, the problem with this recipe is that most of the ingredients are whole items—a carrot, a yellow pepper, a stalk of celery, an onion, a can of diced tomatoes—and so in order to get the proportions of the soup right for a half recipe, you wind up sticking the remaining halves of everything in the fridge, where it all goes bad, and you have to throw it away anyway.
Poor Herb Tarlek. Who among us hasn’t left a beer can on the night table on occasion?
Ha says you’re supposed to use a wooden spoon, but she has no idea why.
The worst is when you make something really fantastic one time, but then can't replicate it. Even when I think I'm following a recipe, sometimes some overlooked minor change can make a big difference.
The woe of lentil soup leftovers: half a carrot, half a stalk of celery, half an onion. Good heavens, woman, that is mirepoix . . . and what most of my dinner recipes begin with.