Dal Tadka (or Tarka) is a simple Indian lentil dish. Its flavor comes from the tempering added at the end which contains some simple but delicious flavors. This is just one way to make this dish; there are probably as many temperings as there are combinations of spices, and the great thing about this dish is that you can absolutely experiment with different spices in the tempering. You can even make a different tempering for each bowl of lentils if you want. You will need: Lentils Water Salt Spices Oil Lentils This dish is best when made with some combination of dal, which is just the word people from the Indian subcontinent (and others) use to describe various split lentils or peas. Split green peas are the most familiar for many people, and you can use them here, but traditionally split green (masoor dal) or black (urad dal) lentils, split mung beans (moong dal), or split chick peas (chana dal) or pigeon peas (toor dal) (or a comination) are used. Don't worry if that's deepl...

One of the issues with cooking with spices is that if you're cooking something that takes a while, or requires high heat, it can kill most of the delicate flavors of spices. Sometimes that's what you want; garlic is very assertive right out of the gate, but if you cook it in a sauce for a while, it becomes mild and recedes into the background of the flavor. Other times, though, the delicate flavor is all you have, and after an hour of simmering you might as well not have added any spices at all. Some herbs in particular are delicate, like basil or cilantro, and should only be added toward the end of the cooking period, and that works for them, but there are spices which have a lovely taste when they've been cooked a little that lose that taste if they're cooked a lot. If you add them to the end of a dish, they come on too strong, but if you add them at the beginning they may become too subtle. Sometimes spices are almost inedible without blooming them in oil, but if you...

Coriander seed (not to be confused with the leaves of the same plant which many English-speaking people also call coriander but which Americans typically know as cilantro) is one of my favorite spices. I add it to all sorts of things, so I'm starting our tour of my spice cabinet with coriander because it was a toss-up between that and cumin. I think a lot of people, at least in certain parts of the world, know cumin fairly well, but coriander is one of those spices which everyone knows about but most people ignore in favor of flashier flavors, which is a shame. In the picture above, on the right is the whole seed, which you may recognize from pickling spice or possibly from the little packet of spices they include with corned beef. Maybe you've encountered it in some other way, but it's much less common than its ground partner on the left. Most people have a small container of ground coriander seed they bought for some recipe at some point and then left in the cabinet. Mayb...

 This is just a short (short? With me, who knows?) introduction to one of the reasons I started this blog, which is to talk about spices. I'm going to make an ongoing series (until I run out of spices to taste) discussing an herb or spice (the difference, if there is one, doesn't matter), its taste, its looks, and what things might be good to try adding it to. If I assemble enough recipes I might even start linking them below pages where their ingredients match up, but really, this is more about flavor pairings than any specific recipe. With that said, the absolute best way to figure out what a spice is good for is the thing that everyone seems terrified to do, and that's to taste it. Just haul off and put a pinch in your mouth. You can worry about how it mellows when you cook it later; for now, taste it at its most intense so you know every note that it might have. So, when I talk about how a spice tastes, it's because I've recently placed it on my tongue. I don...

Since the dawn of time cooks have struggled with the simple task of keeping food from sticking to their cookware. Now if that's not an introductory sentence from a high school science paper, I don't know what is. The truth is that many things are claimed to be nonstick but most of them are only nonstick in theory. In practice, you're swearing at your eggs while your children look on in horror and your dinner guests wonder what's happening in the kitchen. This is a no-shame zone, so let's all just take a deep breath and then admit that we've had food stick to pans which were described as miraculously nonstick. We've had food stick to all sorts of pans, probably. And the thing is, there are a few simple things that can be done to keep it from happening as often, but it'll probably still happen occasionally. Breath. Cleansing breaths. It's not because you're a bad person. If you're using something other than a nonstick pan, food is sticking beca...

 So you've decided that the $5 frying pan you bought in college to cook hash browns at 3 a.m. for a bunch of stoned people you didn't really even know... this is becoming too personal. Let me start again. So you've decided that you might be in the market for a frying pan. Either you didn't have one before (no shame, no shame, welcome, we're glad to have you) or you had one which was... not up to snuff, shall we say. But now you've been to stores and seen seven thousand pans, and you've looked online and there are now seven million pans, and you went to Consumer Reports and they told you that the best pan was made by a little old man in western Germany and he only makes three pans a year out of meteorite iron and they cost how much?! So you've decided that maybe pans aren't for you. Maybe you'll just eat out for every meal. Or maybe you'll eat nothing but raw food, like a cave man. That's supposed to be good for you, right? Maybe this isn...

Why can't I just call them "pancakes?" Why do I have to be all fancy? Because this recipe is delicious enough to be fancy but comes together quickly with ingredients you probably already know. It's more a class in making pancakes more interesting than anything else. Also, and I'm breaking all the rules here, when you decide you want to put recipes on the internet, they send over a packet with your introductory materials and the contract you have to sign, and one of the stipulations of that contract is that you never call pancakes "pancakes" because it freaks out the simple minds of the internet proletariat. I'm probably not allowed to tell you that you're the internet proletariat either, but trust me, all the other cooking blogs out there know too, and I'm the only one who has the guts to admit that internet cooking blogs are laughing at you behind your back. You shouldn't trust those lying blogs. Only trust me. Griddle cakes of all sorts...

 As I've said before, we don't do cultural appropriation here at This Is Cookable. This is inspired by the flavors of the Caribbean, from Jamaican jerk to curry to a little bit of Dominican goodness, but it is not authentic and I urge you, go find your local Caribbean restaurant, if you've got one, and try out the real deal, because it is amazing. This takes a little while to cook but not so long that you can't make this a weeknight meal at the last minute. It's full of bold flavors and will make you think about sweet and savory in a whole new way. You Will Need: Beans Meat? Pineapple Tomatoes Onion Peppers Spices Oil Salt and Sugar Black beans Okay, this shouldn't be a surprise, given the title of the recipe, but you don't actually need black beans. Pinto beans, pink beans, or even navy or Great Northern beans will work. I would steer clear of kidney beans, but in a pinch they might work. Go for light red rather than dark red. This is a curry so you might t...

 This is Korean-inspired because here at This Is Cookable, we don't do cultural appropriation. This is a recipe which uses some traditional Korean ingredients, but it's not traditional and I'm sharing it because hopefully you'll taste it, see how amazing it is, and go find some real Korean cuisine to try. A warning up-front: this is spicy, though not incredibly spicy. One of the tricks is sautéing the spicy ingredients a little to temper the heat, and you can use more or less of them depending on your taste. You can even make this completely mild in a way I'll discuss later, but it will be a different dish at that point. You will need: Pork Ribs Gochujang Cabbage Onion Garlic and Ginger Salt or Something Salty Five-Spice Powder Sugar Oil Pork ribs Unless you've got a pot the size of a rack of ribs, the best option (and usually the cheapest) is Country Style bone-in pork ribs. It may be called something else, but what that means is that the ribs have been cut apa...