Ki Kitchen: The Newsletter Volume 2 issue 3 | Page 8

HOW TO COOK MO BETTA

Here is where I will share my cooking tips so you can cook mo betta at home. So where do we start? What makes a dish is so hard to speak on. Over the years I have learned so much and then still I am not sure what I do that makes it any different from what you may decide to do. So I will use this space to just start a dialogue and I am depending on my readers, friends, and family to tell me what is obvious and what do you guys need to know.

Okay so first things first. A dish should be either sweet, spicy, salty,or sour,the first consideration then the dish should have texture. So when I think of a dish if its sweet I think of how to balance it with either sour or salty. If I have a gastrique (fruit vinegar sauce) then I will have a heavy dose of salt and pepper on the protein. Then maybe I would do rice for a bit of texture and because it would soak up the gastrique which is me hopping ahead in.

Components of the dish are meant not to be separated but instead enjoyed wholly together. So if I do jasmine rice, green beans, grilled pork and pineapple gastrique. All the components are meant to compliment each other. The rice is a vessel for the sauce and a texture. The grilled pork is a salty savory element to balance the sweet and sour found in the gastrique. The green beans give a bit of earthiness and will carry some garlic, salt and pepper which every dish could use. And if you can get your grill hot enough (which I can), the nice marks the grill will give the pork adds a nice crunch.

Besides that, my secret is to kiss it! Keep it simple. Mother Nature knows what she is doing. Trust her. Spices are your friend , but they were originally so important because lack of refrigeration made it necessary to find alternative methods to store and keep food. Salt and sugar were necessary to cure and store foods and sometimes your rancid meat had to be eaten and seasoned so you could choke it down. Now we can get seafood from Hawaii that has literally been out of the ocean for less than 24 hours. Trust mother nature, lay off the seasonings.

written by: Kevin Sullivan