How many tomatoes? Diving into another culture’s cooking is always a worthwhile risk

It was about the point when the plastic bag I was stuffing full of Roma tomatoes got up to 4 pounds or so that I began to sense the culinary stunt I’d invited my closest friends and family to witness had veered hard toward disaster.

The main dish everyone was coming over for in just a couple of hours was supposed to be almost entirely ground beef fragrant with Indian spices. I didn’t remember any tomatoes in it at all. Here I was, though, still counting more tomatoes into a produce bag that already outweighed the packages of meat in my cart.

Something was obviously wrong. The full picture of what that was and how it might be fixed was hazy, though, so I fell back to grabbing all the tomatoes that were on my grocery list.

I was trying to make keema, a deeply nostalgic dish to me and my guests, but the realization that I hadn’t tasted it in a good 20 years was beginning to feel like a problem. As was the fact that keema had been a showpiece in the phenomenal kitchen repertoire that my friends’ late mother, Shiro, had mastered growing up in India — and these were the friends whose families I’d invited to this dinner.

None of this felt like a problem when I set the plan in motion a few nights earlier.

Hang on, “plan” isn’t what you call this sort of thing. What am I thinking of? Yeah, “gross negligence.”

So none of this felt like a problem when I set the gross negligence in motion a few nights earlier. In fact, it felt like the perfect tribute to the way Shiro made my family a part of her own every time she cooked for us.

The idea to re-create one of her dinners had sprung from conversation as Shiro’s sons polished off several carry-out containers of aguachile with my brother and me at my parents’ house.

Lately I make sure to get one or two orders of wildly spicy aguachile — raw shrimp marinated in lime juice and chilies — every time I visit my folks in California. Nobody had heard of it when I was growing up, but aguachile food trucks are everywhere now.

It’s almost ceviche, the citrus-marinated seafood that’s as common in Midwest Tex-Mex joints as it is on Mexican beaches. But perhaps south of the border, where food can be spicy, a lucky fool might have added an unreasonable number of chilies to a batch of ceviche and accidentally created a mouthwatering new food.

The amount of chilies still teeters close to unreasonable at the best aguachile trucks, and that makes for a powerful burn to be quenched. In fact, I blame the beer we downed during our conversation over those particular containers of aguachile for making me think I could tackle an unfamiliar, sentimental dish from a complex cuisine I don’t know much about.

Clueless bravado is lousy fuel for most projects. It certainly didn’t get me close to anyone’s memory of Shiro’s keema, which I later learned did have tomatoes, but just a handful. My friends laughed at me, but whatever I made that evening was good enough that we ate up most of the 8 pounds or so that were in the pot.

I’d cook it again. And since I still don’t have a clear idea of what I’m aiming for, there’s a chance I’ll end up making the sort of brilliant mistake that I suspect was behind the world’s first batch of aguachile.

Meanwhile, I challenged my friends to carry forward the grossly negligent hospitality of that Indian dinner by cooking my family something from our culture.

My grandma Maria used to make a killer chicken mole. That needs a sauce of chocolate and nuts and chilies and then different chilies and some fruit and at least eight or 12 more ingredients, depending on whose grandma taught you — all kinds of chances for a brilliant mistake, or at least a laugh.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.