Sorry to disappoint you but, I am not going to talk about the affectionate action of kissing between lovers, family members, or friends.

This is the acronym most of us are familiar with which stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’, a term coined by the US Navy sometime in the sixties as a guiding principle for engineering design.  Since then, it has been adopted and adapted for many purposes.  Even Bill Clinton used a variation on this theme in his presidential election campaign in 1992 to articulate his top executive priority as the new president.  He used the term: ‘It Is the Economy, Stupid’.

So, I will not miss out on the opportunity of using this principle to communicate how I now feel about food and cooking.  I must confess that the cooking KISS principle only dawned on me in the last 3 or so years.  I am still on a transitional journey to apply this principle in full, because old habits die hard.

In my early ‘foodie days’, I wanted to experiment by adding, subtracting or substituting ingredients and cooking methods, believing I could improve on a dish I already liked.  It was like taking a paint brush to the Mona Lisa to try and broaden her smile or, altering the tune of ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ when it is already a perfect song.  I would be out of my mind to attempt either.

The psychology is simple, really.  Some of us cook to feed and please others, while the rest cook to please themselves first and if others like the result, then all is good and well.  Celebrity Michelin-starred chefs surround themselves with an aura of mystery and psych us up to expect a taste that will blow our minds; we fall for it, every time.  After all, we pay a lot of money to experience what the chefs tell us that the food we are about to consume will taste ‘out of this world’.  Very often it does turn out to be out of this world experience but, not necessarily in a good way.  Sardine-flavoured ice cream or flash freezing fresh fruit using liquid nitrogen will assault your taste buds as surly as a bomb exploding in your mouth.

Another aspect of food enjoyment is almost unattainable.  When we are very young, we are brought up to enjoy the food our mothers prepare for us.  At that young age, our senses are extremely sensitive, and taste of food is informed / educated by our mothers’ cooking.  Often, we associate a meal with a specific happy memory and the combination of strong sense of taste and smell, as well as associated happy memories creates a blueprint of what a perfect roast chicken, freshly baked bread, rice pudding, or whatever, should taste like.

As adults, we ignorantly, and sometimes cruelly, compare a simple vegetable soup made by our spouses with similar soup ‘made by mother’ when we were children and declare something like: ‘It was a nice soup darling but, it can never beat my mother’s vegetable soup’.  Assuming your darling does not murder you on the spot, the truth of the matter is that our taste buds have been dulled over many years of abuse through alcohol, smoke and generally living for a long time.  The end result is that no matter who makes the vegetable soup, including your mother herself, it will never taste like it did all those years back.

However, all is not lost!  Here is my own experience and how I had my epiphany on this subject.  When I first left home in Palestine, I came to England to attend college then university.  British cooking did not do much for me at the time so, with a few friends, from the same part of the world, we began to write home (no internet or emails then), requesting from our families’ recipes for food we enjoyed at home.  When a reply eventually arrived, we studied the instructions and immediately set about making the meal in question.

Anyway, we started to cook stuff, with limited success but, it was preferable to the local food on offer.  Finally, this gang of amateur cooks disbanded, and we all went our separate ways.  I continued my quest for better results with glacier-pace improvement.  Then I hit on what I thought was the big secret.  I decided to embellish recipes with more spices, colours, presentation and new and strange ingredients.  For example, I wanted to master the art of making the best falafel in the world (as if you can actually judge such a thing when it was all to do with personal taste).  I came up with about 8 different variations on the humble falafel with lots of spices, addition of flour, aubergines, courgettes, boil the ingredients before frying, doubling the garlic ingredient, more parsley, less coriander and so on.  I tried everything short of adding sugar or wine to the recipe!

My poor family was subjected to taste sessions and out of politeness, or desire to get rid of my mild bullying, they randomly chose their individual favourite versions.  In the end, after a visit to Jordan and being taken to a very modest restaurant called Hashem in downtown Amman, where they truly produced incredibly tasty and very cheap falafel.  When you look inside this humble falafel, it looked so simple and unfussy!  There was nothing for it other than to accept that falafel is a simple common people food loved by millions throughout the Middle East and gradually gaining favour in the West.

One by one, my various elaborate recipes began to fade as I reverted to simplicity of ingredients, as long as they were good quality.  For instance, lentil soup should have 3 ingredients plus one primary spice.  I now prefer Japanese sashimi to sushi.  A good quality steak hung for a minimum of 4 weeks is best grilled with nothing at all other than rock salt to glaze the outer surface and preserve the juice inside the steak.  I think it is criminal to cook good steak in all kinds of sauces, including cream (as in Steak Diane).  You can add vegetables and whatever side dishes next to the steak but, leave the steak alone!  Okay, I still add a bit of crushed garlic towards the end of grilling but as I said earlier, I am still on my conversion journey.

I am not too proud to check out YouTube for recipes from Europe, Middle East, Far East etc. However, I only go for the recipes that are not elaborate and seem to be authentic.

So, as of now, every blog I add to the Foodie section will be as faithful to the original simple recipe instead of trying to bring to life my dead taste buds by having stronger, more elaborate and complex ingredients.  This is partly to encourage you to have courage to cook simple food and partly to help me implement the principle of ‘simple food is best’.  In other words: KISS!

Happy Easter to you all.