The vegetable curry I served that evening had a strange gritty texture.
My friends said things like “delicious” and “this is great” while quietly pushing large pieces of carrot and cauliflower around their plates rather than actually eating them.
It was my first dinner party at university.
At the time I believed I was quite a capable cook.
Looking back, I was something slightly different: a cook whose confidence comfortably exceeded his ability.
Like most students I had mastered the basic survival formula for cooking proper meals rather than living entirely on toast and takeaways. The system was simple.
Fry onions.
Possibly mushrooms.
Add meat — usually beef mince.
Add vegetables.
Add stock and herbs or spices depending on where you want the meal to go.
With that structure you could produce most of the essential foods of student life: bolognese, cottage pie filling, chilli, and a few other variations that all followed the same basic logic.
Even then, without really thinking about it, I was using formulas to get to outcomes.
So when I invited friends over for dinner I did what I’d been told was the polite thing to do and asked about dietary requirements. This was how I discovered that several of them were vegetarians.
Growing up in a mining town in the north, vegetarianism had not featured heavily in my previous cooking education.
But I wasn’t worried, because I had a formula.
Remove the meat.
Add more vegetables.
Add curry powder.
Vegetable curry.
Problem solved.
Except it wasn’t.
What I served that evening was not really a curry at all. It was closer to a vegetable stew that someone had panicked and tried to convert into curry by adding spice at the last minute. The texture was wrong, the balance of flavours was wrong, and the whole thing had a faintly gritty quality that suggested something had gone slightly off the rails somewhere along the way.
My friends were extremely kind about it.
They praised the meal enthusiastically while quietly rearranging the vegetables on their plates in ways that avoided actually eating most of them.
It was a useful moment.
Several lessons appeared that evening.
The first was that not all formulas transfer neatly from one situation to another. A pattern that works perfectly in one type of cooking can fall apart completely somewhere else.
The second was that world cuisine is more than the spices you add at the end. You can’t turn a western stew into “Asian food” simply by introducing curry powder.
The third lesson was about people. What people say and what they mean are sometimes very different things, especially when they are trying to be polite at someone else’s dinner table.
But the most important lesson was this:
What you don’t know is often more important than what you do know.
That evening didn’t end my interest in cooking, but it did change how I approached learning.
Somewhere in the weeks that followed three small systems appeared.
The first was a simple failure log — writing down what had gone wrong so I didn’t repeat the same mistake the next time.
The second was a learning journal, where I began trying to understand the things I clearly didn’t know yet. One early discovery was that “Asian cuisine” is not a single thing, and in fact represents a vast portion of the planet with thousands of different traditions.
The third was a basic objective plan: deciding what I wanted to achieve and how I would know if I had succeeded.
Those tools were crude at the time, but they were early versions of things I still use today.
All of them started with a very bad vegetable curry.