The most important ingredient

9.17am 8 Oct 2006 Sunday

Eating is about the exquisite tastes and the warmth that envelopes you when you enjoy the food.

Cooking, is a process of accumulating faith.

Today I woke up and decided to make a quiche. As I was researching for a good recipe, I changed my mind and tried a pot pie recipe instead.

On Friday I had felt adventurous and bought a butternut squash despite H's warning that he didn't really like it. It was certainly hard to prepare, since that darn thing was as tough as bricks, but I managed to chop it up without destroying the countertop nor losing any fingers. The taste of a boiled butternut squash was.. not repulsive. Maybe I can ignore its taste in the final product.

Then I started making the sauce with my own proportions because I was too much of a skinflint to waste, ahem, I mean use, all my good Kerrigold butter for the recipe. So la di da di da... everything looked ok, until I tasted it. Somehow there was this flat taste so I thought maybe the flour was undercooked. The Sambuca I added had a strong licorice taste that I didn't like, but well, I'll cook it a little longer to evaporate more of the alcohol. Eee and I think my veggie stock has that strong weird taste I can't even identify. Must have been the carrot tops. After 10 minutes, I realised that the taste wasn't going to change anymore and I just have to make do with what I had. It's just 4 meals anyway.

I dumped the veggies into the sauce unceremoniously and stirred, a little disappointed at the whole experiment. After transferring the filling into 4 ovenproof bowls, I decided to eat the rest of the veggies instead of trying to stuff everything in.

To my great surprise, the unassuming veggies and the weird tasting sauce that I didn't even fancy, somehow morphed into a totally different taste when mixed together. The licorice/ anise taste from the Sambuca faded into the background. The sweetness of the butternut squash shone through the savoury, creamy sauce. Heck, even the potatoes tasted good with a little bit of the sauce.

Then I came to my great big conclusion: The most important ingredient of all, when cooking, is faith. It isn't about a million and one herbs to spice the thing up, nor does it rely on expensive and high quality ingredients. I had went with my instincts to use only 1/4 of the butter called for, 1/4 the amount of onions, homemade veggie stock in an estimated amount, and a whole lot of veggies. I took a shot at adding the amount of flour, and milk instead of cream. The original recipe had fennel, saffron, pearl onions, blah blah... I don't have no fancy schmancy fennel (and I think I'd have died from the licorice overload) so I just dunked in whatever I had, in a proportion that felt right.

You see, I realised a commonality in all my cooking attempts - it's all about faith in your ability to get a right feel for the right mix, the right taste. And a finished dish is not about its individual components, but the sum total of all your intuition.