Suggestions

[OakLeaf]

I agree. I went through an Indian food phase when DH and I first got together. I cooked Indian 2-3 days a week for probably three years and never progressed beyond slavishly following recipes. If you pick one cuisine and stick with it, you have a hope of beginning to understand it and learning to cook creatively, or at least have a small repertoire that you can come down to when you don't have a recipe in front of you or just don't feel like the complication. Plus, any single cuisine is enough to fill most people's spice cabinet. And then there's freshness of the spices. Unless you have a good bulk shop where you can buy herbs and spices a tablespoon at a time, if you're cooking in too many different cuisines, you're using so little of each spice that they all go stale (or you have to keep throwing out and replacing them, not good either).

I should add that most spices come in 4-oz packages at the Indian grocery, sometimes larger. So you have to buy (and use or potentially discard) WAY more than you do when you're buying Eurocentric spices in 1/2 or 1 oz ziplocs. Again, a good bulk shop will have most of what you need to cook most Indian recipes, but things like asafoetida and curry leaves that you'll need often, and less common things like black cumin, amchoor, black salt, anardana, foenugreek leaves, or black cardamom, can be hard to find anywhere but an Indian grocery.