135: Indian Slaw

My usual setup for recipes is as follows: get home, maybe have a little snack. Find the recipe(s) I'd like to work on, and transfer them to my basketball whiteboard clipboard (kinda like that, though mine is on the back of the clipboard) and cook.

Now and then I make a little mistake transcribing of reading. The latter is what happened with this slaw. I used a recipe from smitten kitchen (who in turn got it from here- linkage mostly for me, as the article seems cool). It seemed wonderfully simple, something I couldn't really mess up even though I'd never had it before. Of course I did, just a little though, and not enough to make it inedible. Lefty is the first version, righty is the correct one I whipped up the next morning.

In lieu of shredding the cabbage with the grater (which works, but makes more of a mess than I wanted), practiced my knife skills a bit and did a reasonably good job breaking it down. That wasn't the problem. Minced up my serrano, discarding the seeds. Added it to the lemon juice, salt and sugar. 

Mixed that with the cabbage and tasted. It didn't taste sweet at all- so I played that little game where I added some honey, which made it a little too sweet, then more lemon juice, and a little back and forth until it balanced well. A little tricky, but again, not the problem.

The problem came with the mustard seeds. Misread the 1/2 tsp as a 1/2 Tbs. Whoops! Beyond that it was fine, it's just that the toasted seeds (which did in fact taste like popcorn) kind of overpowered the rest of the flavors. Again, not inedibly, but a little stronger than one would like. And for whatever reason my seeded serrano had no heat at all.

Luckily my 1/2 cabbage had yielded about a cup more shredded goodness than the recipe required, so instead of another random dish I made a new batch before work this morning. Left the seeds in my serrano, measured my mustard correctly. Out the door on time for work, even.

The flavor is simple but good. Less mustard, more heat, and looking forward to lunch.