spices

90% of the battle when you cook are the ingredients. it doesn't matter how good of a cook you are, it'll be very hard to turn bad ingredients into something tasty. this includes everything in your pantry - which is especially useful come wintertime, when you can't just rely on tomatoes and basil to make dinner taste delicious.

how many of you have actually thrown out spices once a year like chefs on tv tell you to? well once you do, here's a better solution to your dried herb & spice problem. buy smaller quantities!!! start thinking of spices as fresh ingredients. you wouldn't ever buy a years supply of tomatoes - even canned, so why buy five-years worth of cumin seeds? sure you save a couple pennies - maybe even a dollar, but it's not worth it!

Penzeys is still my go to herb & spice store - though any dedicated herb&spice store should provide top notch stuff. they sell all their products in small to very large quantities - so you can buy what's right for you. Some places let you weigh out what you need - even better! Final tip... buy all your spices whole and get a dedicated spice grinder. Any $15 coffee grinder will do the trick. I guarantee you people will start noticing how much more flavor your food has.

anyway, with a few good spices (cloves, whole cinnamon and cardamom) I made a delicious Indian Dal. Dal can be just about anything - basically some lentils, beans or grains cooked down with spices into what resembles a porridge. red lentils cook down especially quickly, so you can have dinner ready in 20 minutes. here's Mark Bittman's recent Dal video, though there are many other recipes to be found online. The only thing I added that isn't shown above is split roasted chickpeas which I soaked overnight. they added a little bit of texture to make things a bit more interesting. I forgot to take a picture of the end product, so i'll let you use your imagination here... sorry!