Nobody likes food as much as my partner likes Indian food. I have watched them maul a plate of chicken kebob & turmeric-infused rice like it was a message from the divine, moaning in spurts. I have witnessed them go to an Indian restaurant in Portugal, order the tawa fish, and talk about the tawa fish for two months. At one point they flew to India, actual India, took a street food tour, wrote everything down that they ate, and resolved to find equivalents back home. For them, the worst Indian food is still better than the best anything else.

I cook for this person often, so therefore I must learn how to do Indian food.

The problem is that most Indian recipes that I’ve encountered involve 50 ingredients and take three hours, and I do not have the brain or the time for any of this. Indian food for me has historically gone like this: I get curious, try, get thwarted, vow to never do that again, forget, and then try a few years later, rinse & repeat. I went through this cycle again a couple of weeks ago, making something I thought was “simple,” and it ran two hours over and was not good. On the one hand, I knew that I didn’t make something good. On the other, I was so hungry that I didn’t really taste it, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

The answer, of course, is to search for fast Indian recipes, which exist but largely in some watered-down form. Is that really Indian food? Maybe if you squint? It may not clear the bar of my kind-but-discerning dining companion. We must do better.

Those of you who’ve read text for a while know I have a lot of history making Chinese food, especially Sichuan food. Indian and Chinese food have quite a few parallels at the highest level:

• Both countries are ~1.4B people
• American interpretations of each food system are extremely narrow, focused on one or two regions & traditions
• Lots of stuff has been remixed, existing here but not commonly over there
• We name both food systems after the entire country, when in fact there are dozens of smaller regions, each with their own separate food systems
• In America, both countries have national grocery chains that support those in the know, but are largely illegible to outsiders
• Both countries, I’ve been told, refer to all European food as “western food”

I learned how to make Chinese food with a lot of trial & error after learning the basic techniques, mise, and processes. I needed the same for Indian food, and I needed it for recipes that take an hour. An actual hour. Not an hour as written at the top of the recipe, but after reading the recipe the amount of time it takes to prep clearly adds to an hour, start to finish. Recipes, regardless of region, lie about this, and we must not trust them.

At the same time, I want to learn more about Indian regionality. Based on what I know from others’ visits and what I’ve read, it sounds like India possesses one of the most varied & fascinating food systems on earth. When my partner visited India, they hit a few cities in the north and then flew across the country and drove around the south for a week. The food systems could not have possibly been more different. Of course you would expect this given the history & demographics, but it’s worth saying out loud all the same.

Now is a good time to think about all of this, because Chicago’s produce hasn’t arrived yet, and so there isn’t a whole lot I can truly screw up. So I went to that national chain for the first time in years last night, and I moved slowly through it, camera out, figuring out the brands, wondering what that weird spiny plant is in the corner, and building out my pantry. I probably annoyed everyone around me, which is why I did this on a Wednesday late at night and will never do it again.

I did this in order to make three recipes from this book, which is probably not totally representative of Indian food but is, crucially, all doable within an actual hour and written by an actual Indian person from the perspective of cooking at home while busy with the rest of life. Not many ingredients! Lots of education about technique & process, in a way that allows me to make simple things on the fly! A balm. A port in the storm. Finding some form of the center. If you know more books like this, send them to me.

If making central Chinese food for 25 years has taught me anything, it’s that I will never be good at Chinese food, I will barely even know Chinese food, and every time I think I have a grip on any one aspect of Chinese food I will look up the proverbial mountain and see it yawning into the infinite distance. The same with “Indian food,” a monolith that exists and does not. I will never know Indian food. I will barely be good at Indian food. As I cook, I will become only less bad at Indian food. The goal is this: in a few decades, I will make an Indian meal, and for the first time in history it will taste good, like actually good, and then I will retire and die.