I love cooking with spices. You can give any ingredient or recipe an instant sense of regionality as well as a fiery heat or delicate complexity. Spices can breath life into a dish and they can bog it down and remind us why we started using them in the first place, before refrigerators came into fashion.
Do you know (without looking up on google) what what makes up the chinese 5 spice? How about Arabic or Turkish 7 spice (baharat)? French "quatre epices" (4 spice)?
I started thinking about this the other day when I ran across one that I hadn't heard of before; vadouvan. What are characteristic elements of less clearly defined mixes like, cajun, pickling spices, tex-mex? Or older mixes like shichimi togarashi, zaa'tar, garam masala, ras-el hanout, chermoula, harissa, berbere?
A little while back David brought this website to my attention: Gernot Katzer's Spices. Its really an amazing resource.
I was able to find recipes I was happy with:
berbere
vadouvan
pickling spices
tex-mex
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