Want to try cooking something really new? Try doing it for a whole month.

tl;dr - make one type of cuisine for a whole month and you can actually use the obscure ingredients you drove across town to get.

A quest for achievable food nirvana

I wonder: how many secret recipes are there, really?

Probably not many, especially compared to the total number of recipes out there on the internet. Still, there are plenty of folks that think they have a secret recipe but actually don't. For all the good it did me up until a coupe of years ago, all the recipes in the world might have been secret.

But then I realized something. Recipes can't all be secret, or else how could seemingly every Indian restaurant in the states have figured out how to make basically the same Saag Paneer. Sure, there's some variation, but there's enough consistency that the recipe can't be secret. To be fair, it's delicious enough that it would be worth trying to keep it secret.

This realization that the recipes for the food I love are just sitting out there on the internet waiting to be discovered led me to spend more and more time thinking that I would actually try and make the foods I love to cook. So eventually I set out to do it. As it turns out, YouTube is the place to go for Indian recipes, and you can find about a zillion different recipes for any and every indian dish I had ever heard of and a ton more I hadn't. So I figured it must be out there, the perfect recipe for Saag Paneer.

All I needed was a little time to practice and the right ingredients. But as anyone who has gotten a bit ambitious in the ethnic cooking department knows, there's inevitably some ingredient that you have to substitute, or else something you have to travel across town to find. That was certainly the case for me. My Indian spice cupboard was looking a little slim.

Getting around the ingredients problem

Savannah and I have found a workable solution to this is to find enough recipes of the same type (indian, chinese, italian, etc) that share some common specialty ingredients to justify the trip across town for the ingredients to stock our pantry. Luckily, we've found that a lot of the trickiest ingredients are just that - pantry ingredients. Spices, vinegars, various ferments, etc. The time frame that is working for this is about a month. If we gather enough recipes for a month then we can usually find enough overlap to justify the weird ingredients. And one month is about our limit in terms of cooking project stamina.

That pattern is the single best thing about sticking with one cuisine over the course of the month - you get to reuse ingredients that would otherwise probably not be worth purchasing for just one recipe. Instead of trying to find replacements, we would just go out and buy the exact thing the recipe called for, since there was a good chance we would be using it again. Another benefit of that is that I now know my way around a Chinese grocery store. Pro tip: if you're looking for fermented black beans, go to the spices aisle, not the canned vegetables aisle.

Chinese month

The first month we did this, we chose to find a bunch of Chinese wok recipes. Motivating this choice, perhaps unsurprisingly was the need to break in a new wok. Chinese is a huge category of course, but it gave us enough flexibility to find a bunch of recipes that shared ingredients.

With our category in mind, a bit of research confirmed our suspicion that cooking exclusively Chinese would require us to acquire a whole new pantry of ingredients. One of the best things I discovered in that initial process is that it was possible to choose recipes with a fair amount of overlap. A bunch of recipes called for chin kiang vinegar, shao xing wine, sichuan peppercorn, fermented black beans, woks. Relatively unfamiliar tools of Chinese cooking were appearing together in a bunch different recipes alongside more familiar ingredients - soy sauce, garlic, scallions, chicken. I seasoned our wok, went to the nearest chinese market, picked up the ingredients, and we were off to the races. Once we had made the initial investment into stocking our pantry with Chinese cooking essentials, it got a lot easier.

Over the course of the month we made king pao chicken, braised eggplant, wontons in numb and spicy Sichuan-style chili oil, stir fried cucumber with ground pork, fried rice with basil and green beans, stir fried broccoli, and a few other dishes. Most of the recipes we used came from Serious Eats, which I like not just because of the great recipes, but because it gives explanations and teaches the principles behind the recipes. Full list of recipes at the bottom of this article!

By the way, we didn't want to get tired of Chinese food or tired of cooking, so we decided that we wouldn't make ourselves cook every night and when we ate out we didn't eat Chinese. Together, these constraints helped make this experiment sustainable enough for us to keep doing it.

Indian month, Italian month, and onward

High on our first month's success, we decided to go for gold and try indian. We bought a spice grinder, a ton of interesting new spices, and learned that coriander is the same as cilantro (I guess I knew that?). We made palak paneer three times (still haven't gotten it quite right - we'll get there eventually), baingan bharta, a couple of tasty daals, butter chicken, chicken tikka masala, cauliflower curry, egg curry, and channa masala. We might do another Indian month.

When we did an Italian month, almost all the ingredients were familiar, but we started to learn about how the quality of the dish is limited by the quality of the ingredients that comprise it. We made some delicious pastas and learned that the only canned tomatoes you ever need to buy are whole peeled tomatoes and tomato paste. Did you know you can get tomato paste in a tube instead of a can? That is a life changer.

If you do a cooking month, let me know how it goes!


Recipes from our chinese month (h/t Serious Eats):

If you do this, you're definitely going to want a wok.