As I noted previously, I've had some pretty terrible homemade granola. But most of the recipes I've tried have been really good. All the flavors work together. There's no bite of something — be it dried fruit or a nut or a grain — that clashes with everything else in your mouth.

Kin and I often speculate about why these sorts of things work and don't work, not just when it comes to granola, of course, but with a variety of menu items. What exactly do people do to make some of their home cooking so sub-par, so (sadly!) inedible? Is it the ingredients? The process?

I wonder if people taste things, really taste things, and then think about the experience of the flavors and textures. So much eating happens while multi-tasking, that I don't know that people are aware of their bodies at all when it comes to food. It just gets shoveled in with one hand while the other scrolls and clicks on the phone. There's little space for contemplation and reflection in our culture; no surprise then that people eat blah food.

(I don't mean "healthy" or "unhealthy" here. I mean "blah.")

Home-cooking is supposed to be different, isn't it. It's supposed to be made with care, with better ingredients — less processed, at least. It's supposed to be "personalized" — ha ha — insofar as the likes and dislikes of the eater are well known. Leaving out the onions. Using less cayenne. Substituting dried cranberries for raisins. What have you.

I remember learning — or being told or taught, I suppose — that certain colors didn't "match." Do we receive similar lessons on how certain tastes complement one another? I'm not sure we do.

I made a batch of granola this past weekend, using the New York Times Cooking recipe for Olive Oil Granola with Dried Apricots and Pistachios. Based on the reader comments (and my own tastes), I left out the brown sugar and reduced the amount of maple syrup. I also left out the dried apricots — I didn't have any in the pantry, and like I've said before, I'm not the biggest fan of dried fruit in my granola. But as I tried my first bowl of it this morning, I realized that the apricots were sort of a necessary complement to the pistachios, which are a fine nut, don't get me wrong, but sort of an odd one in one's cereal. I could imagine what the recipe author was doing here, even though my version fell short.

How does one cultivate that sort of imagination, particularly around taste? (There's something about Bourdieu here, perhaps — distinction and class that I want to be wary of, particularly when I say others' home-cooking sucks.) And was it the pistachio itself or the pistachio-is-not-almond? Was it the missing sugar or the missing fruit? And what happens to diagnostics during home-cooking? Does anyone have the time or the energy to think about this?