What’s in Your Wallet (er, fridge) Curry?

I have always thought of myself as very single-mindedly driven. I wanted to be an actress, a Person of the Theatre--that was it. So, imagine my surprise a few years ago, when my mother and my husband both agreed that I was a person of intense, but capricious, passions. 

How could they misunderstand me so thoroughly? Sure, I might develop a mania for learning about Florence Nightingale, or set forth on a ceaseless quest to find a particular wig, knitting needle, corset, dagger, mannequin, or artificial Calla lily, but this was all in the service of whatever theatrical venture engaged me at the moment.

However, unbidden thoughts of other fierce but fleeting interests were summoned—the mini-trampoline I could not live without, the karaoke machine bought on sale, the miniature sewing machine—as seen on TV--and the specialized cake decorating tips that were absolutely necessary. Man, I so hate thinking of myself as a dilettante.

Today I had to incarcerate myself, because I am working on a writing project that has an extremely tight deadline. I envisioned myself working through the night, and directing poor Mark to go the Piper’s Kilt if he wanted any dinner. Of course, that isn’t how it went down.

Following a lengthy interview for my project, with a famously crusty character, my brain was famished. I decided to cook. I was, as usual, in the position of making up a meal based on what was already in the refrigerator and the pantry. Here’s the result.

The Ingredients

• 2 boneless chicken thighs (about ¾ of a pound)
• 1 tblsp tandoori masala spice mix
• 1 tblsp candied ginger
• 4 cloves garlic
• ½ large white onion
• ½ red pepper
• 1 stalk celery
• 1 inch portion of fresh ginger
• 1 small zucchini
• 1 ½ tblsp mild Jamaican style curry powder
• 1 Knorr chicken bouillon cube
• 2 or 3 kefir lime leaves, dried
• 1 lime
• 1 large sweet potato
• ½ cup fresh (or fresh frozen) cranberries
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 3 tblsp of peanut oil
• 1 tsp (or more) of cayenne pepper
• ½ cup frozen peas

The Plan

1. Cut the raw, boneless chicken thighs into bite sized pieces. Cut the candied ginger into tiny bits. Put the chicken and the ginger into a bowl with the tandoori masala spice, and mix it up.
2. Wash the cutting board you used for the previous step really well, or else relegate it to the dish washer and take out another cutting board for the veggies.
3. Chop garlic kind of fine, but don’t go crazy.
4. Chop fresh ginger a bit finer than that.
5. Chop onion, red pepper, celery and zucchini into bite sized bits.
6. Put 1 ½ tblsp of peanut oil into, a large frying pan or Dutch oven and heat it up. It should sizzle when you add something to the pan, but not smoke. Add the onions, garlic, ginger, and celery, and turn down the heat a bit. Let it cook up for a minute or two, then add the red pepper. Put the top on the pan and let this mixture sweat for five minutes. Take off the top, add the zucchini. Let this cook until zucchini is sautéed, about six or seven more minutes. Remove the veggies from the pan. Reserve on a plate.
7. In the meantime, put the kefir lime leafs, the bouillon cube, and the lime juice in a 16 oz Pyrex measuring cup. Put the kettle on to boil with a couple of cups of water. When the kettle starts to whistle, pour the water into the measuring cup, to about 12 ounces. Agitate the liquid to help the bouillon cube dissolve. Then let it steep.
8. Add the rest of the peanut oil to your pan, and reheat. Add another tblsp of the curry powder to the bottom of the pan. Put in your chicken pieces. Cook until they start to brown.
9. Add the cooked veggies back to the pan.
10. Add the sweet potato to the mixture.
11. Mix it around to get it all covered with spice and oil.
12. Add the bouillon mixture and let it come to a boil.
13. Add the cranberries.
14. Add a tsp of cayenne.
15. Cover the pan. Cook for around half an hour, checking frequently to make sure the mixture is not sticking.
16. Taste. Adjust seasonings (it probably needs to be hotter). Cook a 5 to 15 minutes longer if it still doesn’t seem like it’s melding.
17. Taste again. If it seems like it’s getting there, add the peas, and cover for a few moments.
18. Serve, over rice if you like, with plain yogurt or sour cream mixed with fresh dill, cucumbers, olives, or whatever interesting mixture of aromatics and preserved things you have in your fridge. If you happen to have some kind of chutney on the side, like mango ginger, or rhubarb, so much the better.

Food Alchemy, Part II

I was going to call this Food Alchemy, Part I, but then I realized that this is a common theme in my writing. If you want to read what is, essentially, Food Alchemy, Part I, see Croquettes and the Kitchen Sink.

I like to cook. In fact, I have a not-entirely-healthy fascination with cooking—it’s a comfort, a screen between me and the real world, and a major distraction. Dare I say it’s an addiction?

    There are three key things about me and cooking. One, I am not a minimalist. I believe that more is more. If I might serve something with two sides, why not four? If the dessert could have sauce or frosting, why not both? Two, I find it difficult to follow directions. I read the title of a recipe and get giddy with anticipation and inspiration. I have to take a deep breath and force myself to read all of the ingredients and steps decreed by the recipe’s author, and even then I most likely will bushwhack rather than follow the trail marks.

     And three, I am a re-purposer of food. If something wasn’t well liked, or wasn’t finished in one form, I will always try to save it by turning it into something else. Just last week I took the Asian cole slaw (fennel, carrots, cabbage, cilantro, ginger, rice wine vinegar, peanut oil, soy sauce) that was languishing in the refrigerator and transformed it into a stir fry. Sometime a food goes through a series of transmogrifications before I declare victory (every last drop finished) or defeat (down the garbage chute). Which is how we happened to have Super Nachos during the football game last night.

Pork for the Pig

My husband, Mark, is an unapologetic carnivore. I am an apologetic carnivore. I don’t eat meat. That much. I like the flavor, I admit. But I don’t like the concept. At least, I don’t really think I should eat meat. But I do. Sometimes. You see, I’m quite wishy washy, and can stand in the butcher aisle at the supermarket prevaricating about buying flesh for so long that I have to leave so that the manager won’t think I’m a homeless person loitering there.

    But Mark likes most meat, and this fall a type of pork roast that we hadn’t seen before found its way into our favorite store, Adams. It’s a roast called a porchetta, and we liked it because it was flavorful and tender, and not monotonous in texture. It wasn’t difficult to roast it to a crispy tender brown and pink perfection, with the aid of our trusty but ancient meat thermometer.

    Alas, on Thursday night, when the latest porchetta was about to be roasted, the meat thermometer was suddenly nowhere to be found. Both Mark and I know where this implement should live, and each responsibly places it there when it is his or her turn to empty the dishwasher, but it was just gone. Not in its home drawer, nor anywhere else. (As is always the way with such things, it magically reappeared, one drawer over, several days later, but only after I’d replaced it with a digital model endorsed by the ubiquitous Martha Stewart.) Without a meat thermometer to guide us, we miscalculated, and cooked the beastlet until it was nearly white, a disappointingly tough and monochromatic eating experience.

When Life Gives You a Lemon (Or an Orange)

We ate a bit of it, and I sliced it very thin for Mark’s sandwich on Friday, and dressed it with peppadew, home-pickled carrots, butter lettuce, and General Tsao Stir Fry Sauce from Trader Joe’s. But there was still lots of the none-too-flavorful meal left. On Saturday, when I was sitting at my desk, re-re-re-re-writing my resume, I started to think about what I was going to make for dinner, and, the next thing I knew I was in the kitchen, checking my supplies. I was in a musing sort of a trance as I perused the contents of the cabinet over the sink, when the bottle of Dinosaur Barbecue Sauce caught my attention.

I wonder what I could do with that? I wondered.

    Visions of fire pits and smokers, totally impractical in a five-by-ten kitchen on the fifth floor. Wait. Couldn’t I cut up the remaining porchetta, toss it in a baking dish with barbecue sauce, vinegar, orange juice, and a little hot sauce, cook it real slow in a 325 degree oven, until it gets so tender I can shred it with a fork, and call it pulled pork?

    So I did. And Mark ate it for a late supper over the last two slices of that Tuscan Bread (Trader Joe’s, two weeks ago. Don’t worry, we froze it.)

Then on Sunday, after we returned from the New York Botanical Gardens, where we’d attended the last Edible Garden event of the season (gourmet food vendors, outdoor cooking demonstrations by TV star chefs), Mark sat down to watch The Game. I guess it’s football season, then. Or it could be pre-season, or something, I don’t keep up with this stuff. But it occurred to me as I stood in the back of the living room, reading the unimportant parts of the Sunday Times and vaguely watching the incomprehensible scrimmages, that Super Nachos are something that people eat while watching football games. And that got me really excited, because I believed I was in possession of all the ingredients necessary to make something Nacho like.

Out of the Ashes Super Nachos

• I half eaten bag of blue corn tortilla chips
• 1 small container of leftover pulled pork
• 2 scallions (farmers’ market)
• 1 15 ounce can black beans
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 Tblsp peanut oil
• 4 ounces of havarti with jalapenos (I know, sounds weird, on sale at East Village Cheese)
• 1 small container of homemade salsa, with tomatoes, cilantro, pepitas, garlic, and lime juice

1. Get the aluminum tray out of the toaster oven and make sure it’s relatively clean. Line with silver foil.
2. Rinse and chop the scallions.
3. Pour oil into a small frying pan. Add the can of beans, partially drained, and the garlic and chili powders. Smoosh it up with a fork as you heat it over the burner. Make a semi-mash of it, but stir it around as it heats so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan too much.
4. Shred the cheese with a box grater.
5. Make sure that the pork is pliable enough to spread. If it’s coagulated, add a bit of orange juice and heat in the microwave for 20 or 30 seconds.
6. Put a layer of chips down on the silver foil.
7. Cover with a few spoons of black beans, some scallions, a bit of the pork, some salsa, and a handful of cheese. Heap some more chips on top.
8. Repeat this, ending up with three or four layers, or however many your ingredients hold up for. Make sure you top with cheese and salsa.
9. Put this in the toaster oven, with the oven set for 375 degrees. Cook for ten to fifteen minutes, until the cheese is nice and melty and starting to crust on the edges.

Remove tray from the toaster oven, using pot holders. Carefully transfer the silver foil under-layer to a plate, without disturbing the Super Nachos.

Enough to feed two to three football watchers, with beer and many napkins.

    
This may have been the best rendition of the porchetta.

Happy Columbus Day! And No Sea Monster for You!

Back in grade school the art teacher, Mrs. Gardner, used to come into our classroom on Tuesdays, and teach us how to make art. Each week, the definition of art was pretty narrowly proscribed. If Mrs. Gardner was demonstrating how to make a plaster cast of your hand and spray paint it gold, for example, you can bet that the definition of art did not include, say, a plaster cast of your foot. If it was snowflake cut-out day, you’d better believe that none of those snowflakes was going to be any color other than white.

            This approach kind of went against what I was taught at home. There, my mixed media “think-outside-the-box” creations were not discouraged, in fact, they were applauded. You made a collage on a piece of newsprint, using modeling clay, ketchup, and toothpaste? How fabulous! (Well, maybe not the toothpaste part, because of the expense of that particular medium.)  And you’re calling it “The Angry Piano”? How brilliant! How creative! Never mind that the unsuitable media are too fragile to last, or that the picture itself looks nothing like a piano. My uncle had been a famous Abstract Expressionist and he started much the same way.

Angry Piano

            But back to second grade, a century ago. Almost. It was October, and Mrs. Gardner was getting us revved for Columbus Day. The project was “Columbus’s Ships,” the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. These were to be rendered in tempera on oak tag. Mrs. Gardner showed us how to create three masted ships sailing on a blue blue sea, using only the colors in our poster paint set: brown, black, white, yellow, red, blue, green. I always enjoyed it when Mrs. Gardner demonstrated a technique, because she would become very involved in what she was doing, and she would talk the whole time, but it wouldn’t make any sense. It was like her mouth was jabbering along its merry way, powered by the old dinosaur brain, while her cerebral cortex was focused on the demo. In this way, she gave me an unintentional introduction to the theater of the absurd.

            Anyway, we all started to paint, guided by Mrs. Gardner’s masterpiece, which she’d left tacked to the blackboard. Mrs. Gardner passed among us, offering words of encouragement. Until she got to the desk of Joel Perlmutter, where she gasped and clutched her chest. We looked up.

            “What is this?” she asked Joel, striving to be severe, but actually sounding more astonished. “Where are the ships?” She held up the offending painting. “Class, look at this. Do you see any ships?”

            We looked. The bottom of the page was engorged with a large swirling pool of blue and green. Across the top of the page was a dripping, turbulent purple mass—meaning that Joel had mixed his paints, which we were NOT supposed to do.

            “It’s a sea monster,” Joel explained, his face having gone slightly red. “After it ate Columbus’s ships.”

            Mrs. Gardner closed her eyes and shook her head. She looked the very picture of despair. “Oh, honey,” she moaned, slowly, “What a mess!”

            And she made him start over.

            Well, I was incensed. Clearly, this was an example of the bourgeoisie stifling the cutting-edge thinking of proletariat youth. Or something. I mean, that’s what I felt, although I wouldn’t have expressed it in those words in second grade.

And yet. . .  Now when I think about what Mrs. Gardner was up to, I have more respect for her. What was she striving for, in forcing us to color inside the lines? Her job wasn’t really to teach us art, was it? Yes she was a bit silly, and I still think she was part of the plot to get us to endure boredom so that we’d be able to grow up and tolerate employment.  But she was also teaching us things like motor skills, control of media, patience, and how to take on the perspectives of others. Perhaps if I’d been a more cooperative student in Mrs. Gardner’s art class, my handwriting wouldn’t be so lousy, I’d have learned to play the piano, and my language skills would extend beyond a comprehension of American English.

           But enough of that. Here’s a recipe for Mark’s Columbus Day Dinner.

Crispy Ginger, Beet, and Carrot Salad

• 2 raw, whole beets (farmers’ market)
• 2 raw, whole heirloom carrots, one yellow, one red (farmers’ market)
• A handful of parsley (farmers’ market)
• A knob of fresh ginger
• 3 tablespoons of peanut oil
• 2 tablespoons of lime juice
• 1 teaspoon of dijon mustard
• 2 teaspoons of soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons of orange juice
• Several squirts of Sriracha sauce
• 1/8 teaspoon of garlic powder
• ¼  to ½ teaspoons of cumin powder

1. Wash and peel the beets. Then use the coarse side of a box grater to shred them up (the coarse side, not the slicing side).
2. Do the same with the carrots.
3. Rough chop the parsley.
4. Mix the previous three things together in a bowl.
5. Peel the ginger then shred up about a tablespoon, using the finer side of the box grater.
6. Find a small container with a top (a one cup Ball jar would be good), so that you combine stuff in it and shake it around. Put the ginger in there.
7. Add the next 8 ingredients to the jar and shake them all about. After they’ve been shook, and appear to be well mixed together, pour over the shredded veggies.
8. Mix well and chill. A vibrant fall salad will result.

And, no scurvy!

What I Fed Mark Yesterday

Breakfast

• Onion bagel (from the Bagel Hole, Park Slope, Brooklyn) that was going stale in the fridge, but perked right up when toasted and slathered with butter
• 3 eggs, whipped up with a fork, poured into melted butter in a cast iron pan. Stirred constantly until softly scrambled, then covered with a scattering of scallions from the farmers' market (Inwood)
• Apple cider (sold by Breezy Hill Orchard, at the farmers' market)

Lunch (brown bagged for work)

• Tuna salad, made from canned tuna in water (Bumble bee), with chopped homemade dill pickle, celery, red onion, mayo, and black pepper. On Tuscan bread (Trader Joe's, Brooklyn) with butter lettuce (also TJ's) and tomato slices (my garden)
• Half a linzer torte leftover from last weekend's visit to the Pastry Garden (Poughkeepsie)

Dinner (midnight, because he was on the late shift)

• Tomatoes (my garden) pitted Provencal olives (Sahadi's, Brooklyn), home pickled jalepeno, red onions and a drizzle of olive oil
• Corn on the cob (farmers' market), which was husked, buttered while raw, wrapped in saran wrap, and microwaved for 2 minutes
• Cheesy Cauliflower and Swiss Chard Casserole
• And Chardonnay

Recipe for Cheesy Cauliflower and Swiss Chard Casserole

1. Get a big bunch of swiss chard and a cauliflower or maybe a couple of small cauliflowers (maybe the cute ones from the farmers' market--the purple ones, or the yellow ones, or the gaudi-esque green ones)
2. Wash both vegetables well. Trim the chard and cut apart the stems from the leaves so that it will fit into a pot. Core the cauliflower(s) then break them into chunks.
3. Steam the vegetables in separate pots, until leaves of chard are wilted, and stems (and cauliflower) are starting to get tender. Let them cool, then cut them up into mouth-manageable pieces.
4. Mix the veggies together in a large baking dish (like a lasagne pan)
5. Preheat the over to 375 degrees
6. Make the cheese sauce. Use 2 cups of heavy cream, 4 ounces of cream cheese, 8 ounces of shredded cheddar cheese, a tablespoon and a half of dijon mustard, and fresh ground black pepper.
7. Heat the cream until it just starts to simmer. Add the mustard and the cream cheese, and stir until melted and thoroughly mixed. Add 3/4 of the cheddar cheese and the black pepper. Mix the gently bubbling sauce until it is completely smooth.
8. Pour the sauce over the vegetables
9. Put the pan into the oven, and bake for at least half an hour, maybe 45 minutes would be better. You can probably cover it with silver foil for the first 15 minutes so it doesn't dry out. It should be brown and bubbly when you take it out.
10. This is a very forgiving dish. It tastes good hot out of the oven, but is still fine at room temperature, if, say, Mark is much MUCH later coming home than he said he was going to be. Great leftovers, too.