Umami. Umami is your god.
You ever wondered why italians put parmesan or anchovies on everything?
And the same thing about chinese food and soy sauce? and Thai with their Nam Pla?
The answer is Umami.
From wikipedia:
“Umami (旨味?) is one of the five generally recognised basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human tongue. Umami is a loanword from Japanese meaning roughly “tasty”, although “brothy“, “meaty“, or “savory” have been proposed as alternative translations.[1][2] The same taste is also known as xiānwèi (traditional Chinese: 鮮味; simplified Chinese: 鲜味 literally “Fresh Flavor”) in Chinese cooking. In as much as it describes the flavor common to savory products such as meat, cheese, and mushrooms, umami is similar toBrillat-Savarin‘s concept of osmazome, an early attempt to describe the main flavoring component of meat as extracted in the process of making stock.”
Ok, that clarified everything. So how do we use it?
Well, imagine that you have food you want to taste.. ehm.. tastier. The usual solution is to add salt and pepper, or put sauce on. Now this is all well and nice, but salt is unhealthy, and to be honest, salt and pepper can only do so much.
Umami you can use to CHEAT. It is the easy route to everything nommy.
Some suggestions:
Mash: Use a vegetable stock cube instead of butter.
broccoli: sprinkle parmesan over for instant goodness, or pour weak stock over cooked veg.
sauteed onions: a few drops of nam pla or sweet soy sauce in
Add cheese to sauce to thicken them, learn from the Cæsar salad where the dressing has hidden bits of anchovies in it, use soy sauce other places than in chinese food..
In essence: Learn what tastes of umami and use it actively, have fun, experiment, become a better cook.
-Or just go to your local chinese supermarket and buy a bag of MSG. That works too.