When you lose your mojo with your signature specialties...
...it is damn sad, and I'm not sure if you can get it back. You've just got to move on to new dishes.
I mark the passing of two particular Lady Marmalade favorites. I used to make a vegetable stew with chickpeas, eggplant, tomato, and spinach. I learned how to make it in India, and it was a great dish to take to potlucks in college or to feed a crowd. It was a zesty, spicy, soul-satisfying main dish. Sometimes if I felt ambitious, I fried up some pooris (puffy Indian breads) to go with.
Somewhere along the line, I stopped being able to work my usual alchemy with the sauteed eggplant, the coriander and the cumin, the cooked-down tomato. I tried again about a year ago, but I just can't make it work anymore.
Same thing with caldo verde, the Portuguese soup made of potatoes, collards and chourico (or its Spanish variant, caldo gallego, the same thing, but with the addition of white beans or chickpeas). Some Portuguese-style cornbread (broa na fuba) on the side, that was a wonderful meal. A while ago, the potatoes started to taste/feel chalky, and I haven't been able to make it anymore.
*sigh* I suspect it's a matter of one's palate changing.
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18 Comments:
@LM - ((((hugs)))). I feel your pain.
izatryt at 10:38AM on 07/11/08
i have had that happen to me... ugh, it's so depressing. believe it or not it happened to me with something as simple as a potato salad. i'm sure you'll find a new speciality soon and you can tell us all about it.
evilchefmom at 12:37PM on 07/11/08
Really sorry, esp. as that veggie stew sounds great. This may not be relevant in your case but one thing that's worked in the past for me to regain my mojo is to return to the source. I often learn a new dish from a friend or recipe and then adapt it with time. Truth is, I tend to approximate measurements and will often substitute an ingredient or two if the original isn't on hand. If I return to the original source, I can sometimes recreate some of the original magic.
OliverRanch at 12:56PM on 07/11/08
Thanks, everyone. Indeed, Oliver, the "chana baingan sak" [Indian veggie stew] lent itself to some fabulous variations, and I do like to improvise. Sometimes I only let it cook for a half hour so that it stayed soupy, and other times I let it simmer for a hour or two so that the tomatoes cooked down and merged deliciously with the soft eggplant. And like you said, I went back to the original source, hoping to recreate the magic, but the thrill was gone!
I think there's a feng shui factor involved, too. I've lived in my current apartment for about two years and I've noticed that there are certain dishes in this apartment that do not come out well.
Cooking is magic! Or at the very least, energy!
LadyMarmalade at 3:36PM on 07/11/08
Hmmmm, that's a really interesting observation. I've noticed that some wines taste far better at their origin (that sense of place) and have yet to find a really great sourdough bread outside of San Francisco... kitchen to kitchen differences, that is worth some experimentation!
OliverRanch at 4:39PM on 07/11/08
Hmm... interesting... I know for a while there I was having trouble making something really simple and I couldn't bear the thought of f*cking it up again... I think it was scrambled eggs... so I stopped making it for a long time and one day returned and they're okay now... not as magical as before, but passable. Lo the days when I could make a scrambled egg so fluffy it was like eating egg-flavored air.
feistyfoodie at 5:14PM on 07/11/08
This happened to me with my "GO TO" pot roast. One day it just tasted too heavy and over-complicated to my palate (and this was in the winter, mind you) It was very labor intensive so I just went to a simpler prep which my husband tells me he prefers...I do too.
bessfour at 5:29PM on 07/11/08
Yeah it's happened to me too. It's usually when I am trying to repeat a dish that I made "out of nowhere". Damn it!
smile at 8:54PM on 07/11/08
I know exactly how you feel....it happened to me last year when I made 'sauce' for my daughter's birthday. She no longer lives at home, and my husband is not a fan of Italian food (don't ask...sometimes I still wonder how I ended up marrying him...he doesn't like bacon or onions either!)...so I don't make sauce every Sunday anymore....I actually came this close to burning it! I've only made it once since....still alittle nervous about getting back in the saddle.
mepolo at 9:54PM on 07/11/08
Oh, no! That IS sad. Are you sure it's permanent? I mean, I've had my biscuit mojo abandon me on exactly two occasions: once for reasons I still can't fathom, and once because I was so anxiety-ridden that the dough CLEARLY absorbed my emotions and the resulting hockey pucks were as dismal as my disposition. Fortunately, in both cases the the curse was fleeting, and I was back to form with subsequent batches.
Maybe it's just the culinary gods telling you it's time to branch out in new directions, and you'll be able to come back to these personal classics in the fullness of time. I'll keep my fingers crossed!
AuntJenny at 10:10PM on 07/11/08
huh. a sort of similar thing happened to me last winter. i made a batch of the exact same brisket i've been making for over thirty years and i didn't like it anymore.
cybercita at 11:24PM on 07/11/08
I've found two different phenomena at work here.
The first, or "hole in one" is when you get something perfectly right the very first time of trying, and you can't ever get it right again. This happened the firs time I made buttercream frosting. True, it was Banana, notably easier to work with than strawberry, but still: the sugar syrup glistened like crystal, spun its thread deep into the creamy butter, and together became, well, banana-and-butter-flavored air, except more satisfying. AND I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DO THIS AGAIN. Just put it down to being human.
The second phenomenon is losing the mojo. I can't figure out any overall reason either, but I do think that ingredients can change over the years, according to whre they are grown and where one buys them. What's more, vegetables and even meat and be engineered over the years, so that their chemical makeup is just not reliable.
annien at 11:41PM on 07/11/08
I feel your pain. My advice is to give these favorites a rest for a while. You'll know when it's time to go back to them. Trust your instinct.
Kerosena at 11:51PM on 07/11/08
I thought I had lost my bread mojo, and for me this was a crushing defeat. Several loaves of bread in a row were just not right. I thought the bread fairies had left me or that I had somehow lost my bread instinct. The bread looked okay, but the flavor just wasn't what is was supposed to be.
Then I realized that I had somehow refilled my countertop salt container with sugar. An extra teaspoon of sugar in a loaf of bread isn't a big deal, but that lack of salt was.
On the other hand, I have experienced whole days where I just should have stayed out of the kitchen. These tend to be the days when my mind was elsewhere, or when I couldn't spend the time to really enjoy the process. Or when I had something that needed to be cooked because I bought it or thawed it or whatever, but I really wasn't in the mood for it. That's when things get burned, oversalted, or weirdly spiced.
I have learned. If I'm having one of those days, it's better to just pull out a container of spag sauce that I've probably got frozen, or grab some other item that I made on a better day, and go with that instead of murdering some innocent meal.
dbcurrie at 12:43AM on 07/12/08
I discovered that many of the old recipes that gave me comfort as a child are no longer possible with the products available to us today. My grandmother's "egg custard" (creme anglais to us today) just doesnt taste the same. I think it likely that her ingredients were different ( I know her whole milk was "more whole" than mine.) The eggs came from under her chickens. The sugar was different. Has anyone else noticed this as a reason things taste different now?
ocarol at 11:34AM on 07/12/08
Don't you think it's a combination of changing tastes and tastes changing?
Many products have been altered and don't taste or work in a recipe as they once did.
As we "mature" (haha - ok, some of us don't, we just get older), our palates become more sophisticated or just plain change. I know I crave more salt and now love green olives, which I once detested. I had a signature dessert that was a 3 tiered cake with blueberries and cream cheese whipped cream filling. I used to love it and so did my friends and family. Now, I don't even remember the recipe. It became way too sweet.
PerkyMac at 5:35PM on 07/12/08
Have I ever lost my signature mojo? Nope. But then there are a few reasons why.
1) "An amateur cook does a dish over and over until they get it right. A professional chef does a dish over and over until he can't get it wrong". Mario Batali. If you have a written or memorized recipe and your technique down then you will not mess up a dish unless you aren't paying attention. I seems that many or most of us here cook a lot and have at least our basic techniques down. So do you have your recipe truly memorized or written down? That's my first thought. When I work from a written recipe I've done correctly I've never botched it after learning it.
2) You are improvising. This is me all over. I rarely work from a page and don't memorize recipes. 95% of my food is made up on the spot and sometimes they are better than others. Even the ones that I make often are changed around with my whim and mood. Still if i wanted them to be consistent I'd write the stuff down. But unless the dish in question is a total experiment, it will still be tasty regardless of my intended outcome.
So if you have lost your mojo I'd go back to the basics on your dish and practice it.
Bunnyman at 11:47PM on 07/12/08
After a baking disaster where my cake wouldn't bake, frosting looked like lava and the finished product looked like a deconstructed mess, my neighbor gave me this sage (?) piece of advice: Never bake during your time of the month. It just won't come out right LOL! Now the ladies have an excuse. Who/what can the guys blame?
Josdean at 7:37PM on 07/13/08