A while back, Amit made the mistake of posting one of his mouth-watering recipes and, after a sustained campaign of a little arm-twisting and a lot of cajoling, he kindly allowed himself to not only travel all the way across town to have lunch with our family, but make it for us, too.
(Hell, if you’re gonna post your fave recipes, some prey-driven reader’s gonna catch you up, bud. Anyway.)
He arrives with lunch, we half-joke that he can go now, we get stuck in to lunch with noises of anticipation… then appreciation – it’s a damned fine meal we tell Amit, pooh-poohing his modest protestations. And then —
— The Girl excuses herself to get a glass of milk —
— The Goddess excuses Herself to blow Her nose —
— The Boy grovelled to his sister for a glass of milk for him, too, puh-lease —
— and, unable to control my sinuses any more, I whipped out my hanky and blew as discreetly as I could.
A bit hot, is it? our guest chef ventures with a straight face.
The thing was, in consideration of our non-Indian palates, he’d made the meal ‘mild’.
We thought we knew ‘mild’. We have monthly family outings to Asian and Indian restaurants where we order and enjoy meals that ranged from ‘medium’ to ‘hot’. How spicy could our very considerate Indian-born guest’s cooking be?
We learned a few things that day:
- one person’s mild is another’s medium-hot;
- Amit has so made himself this family’s curry king;
- and the local ethnic restaurants have been taking our palates for a ride.
Buried somewhere in this post is a moral about knowing your audience. Or the juggling of thinking you know your audience when your audience has their own idea of what you’re presenting them with.
Thanks to The Goddess, the moral is: pushing your audience means you’re engaging with them. Engage with them and they’ll look forward to your next presentation.
(And Amit lives a whole lot closer now. We look forward to his next recipe posting.)
