How Many Tomatoes? Diving Into Another Cultures Cooking Is Always A Worthwhile Risk

By the time the plastic bag I filled with rum tomatoes had gained about 4 pounds or so, I began to feel like the cooking tricks my close friends and family had invited me to watch had turned into a disaster.

The main course, for which everyone comes in just a few hours, should consist almost entirely of ground beef with Indian spices. I don't remember having tomatoes at all. However, I keep counting new grow bag tomatoes, which already outnumber the meat packs in my cart.

Something is clearly not right. However, the full picture of what it is and how to fix it is still not clear, so I went back to collecting all the tomatoes that were on my shopping list.

I've been trying to make kimchi, a dish that makes me and my guests feel nostalgic, but the realization that I haven't tried it in 20 years is starting to bother me. As well as the fact that kima is an integral part of the vast repertoire of cuisine that my friend Shiro's late mother, Shiro, grew up with in India - and these are friends whose family I invited to dinner tonight.

None of this seemed like a problem when I put the plan into action a few nights ago.

Wait, "plan" is not what you call such things. What is your opinion? Yes, "big mistake".

So none of this seemed like a problem when I did a serious observation the night before. In fact, it seemed like the perfect homage to how Shiro made my family a part of him every time he cooked for us.

The idea to recreate one of his dinners came from a conversation when Shiro's sons finished off a few bowls of aguachile with me and my brother at my parents' house.

Lately, when I visit my parents in California, I'm sure to get an order or two of ultra-spicy aguachile - wild shrimp marinated in lime juice and chili peppers. It was unheard of when I was growing up, but now aguachile food trucks are everywhere.

It's almost like ceviche, the citrus-marinated seafood that's as common in Midwestern Tex-Mex establishments as it is on the Mexican coast. But perhaps south of the border, where food can be spicy, a lucky person might add an absurd amount of chili to a ceviche and accidentally create an incomprehensible new dish.

The amount of chili still fluctuates almost to the point of absurdity in the best aguachile trucks, and it's hard to put down. In fact, I blame the beer we drank from that particular pot during our conversation for thinking I could handle a sentimental, unfamiliar dish of a sophisticated cuisine that I knew so little about.

Ignorance is bad fuel for most projects. This certainly doesn't bring me any closer to anyone's memories of Kim Sher, which I later learned contained tomatoes, but only a few. My friends laugh at me, but everything I cooked that night was enough to eat over the 8 or so pounds that was in the jar.

I will cook again. Since I still don't have a clear idea of what I'm trying to achieve, there's a good chance I made a huge mistake, which I suspect was behind the world's first batch of ads.

In the meantime, I suggested to my friends that they continue the carefree Indian hospitality by cooking something from our culture for my family.

My grandmother Maria used to make chicken killer moles. Requires chocolate sauce, nuts and cayenne, then another chili, some fruit, and at least eight or 12 other ingredients, depending on who your grandma taught you - all sorts of opportunities to make great mistakes or at least laugh .

Richard Espinosa is the former editor of the Johnson County Newspaper. You can contact him at respinozakc@yahoo.com . And follow him on Twitter @respinozakc .