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" &amp;quot;People always ask me how I come up with my recipes, and I tell them, &amp;#039;I sit around and daydream about food. I think about what I want to eat.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; What does it mean to have good taste? Taste is like a muscle. We all have this muscle, but how developed is it? A big component to having taste is knowing what things go together. So be adventurous and try new flavors. How do we learn what goes together? Listen to your palate -- let it tell you what tastes good. I remember as a kid I&amp;#039;d eat hot chutneys and relishes. I loved that the tastes were so concentrated. Now, I like things that are hot and sweet and sour and savory -- when there&amp;#039;s a balance of flavors. What&amp;#039;s an easy way to try new things?  Most of us cook to feed our families and there&amp;#039;s always one person who doesn&amp;#039;t want to try something new. So take a dish like mac and cheese and just add a few new ingredients. If you look at the soups in my new cookbook, there&amp;#039;s a great lemon chicken soup -- the only really odd ingredients are juniper berries and Omani lemons, which give the soup a wonderfully rich tartness with a musky component. Start small: Replace your regular black pepper with Szechuan peppercorns. Or if you&amp;#039;re boiling rice, just throw in a few cloves or star anise to perfume the rice. As the host and a judge on Top Chef, you&amp;#039;ve had to be hard on the contestants. How can you deliver criticism without hurting someone&amp;#039;s feelings? We all have strong opinions about what we put in our mouths -- we all eat! But if someone&amp;#039;s making a dish and you say, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s awful,&amp;quot; it doesn&amp;#039;t help. If you say, &amp;quot;Maybe the chicken needs to be cooked more&amp;quot; -- if you can include some information about why it isn&amp;#039;t working -- then the criticism is constructive. That said, what was the grossest dish you tasted on the show? Nothing was worse than that chocolate ganache with liver! Padma Lakshmi is the host of Bravo&amp;#039;s Top Chef. Her cookbook is Tangy, Tart, Hot &amp;amp;amp; Sweet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/food-recipes/a2235/1007-spice-up-your-pantry/>