two. ate.

When Jan and I first met, one of our first dates was at an Indian restauarnt. The only thing I knew about Indian food was that I thought the curry powder in my mom's spice rack smelled terrible--a cross between severe body odor and high spice...

I was reluctant but because I really liked Jan, I went along. I had a red lamb curry and it was pretty good but I was still wary.

Zoom up to 20 years later and curry is a part of at least one meal every week. We usually make it from scratch. Once you start to experiment with spices, there's no end to the combinations you can make.

Tonight I made a red curry chicken which follows a pretty standard method:
- cook sliced onions until lightly colored
- add dry spices and cook as a roux
- add meat or veg and saute
- add wet, pureéd spices to further moisten the roux
- add stock or water and cook until "done" (10-120 minutes)

For dry spices, it was a combination of tumeric, ground corriander, kashmiri chili powder (medium-hot) and garam masala powder.

For wet spices, it was two small seeded roma tomatoes, one hot green pepper, whole cumin seed, a couple of cloves of garlic, a finger-joint sized piece of peeled ginger, and a small teaspoon of cahsew butter all whizzed up in a blender.

I let the whole thing cook for about 90 minutes at a very low simmer then let it cool for a couple of hours before reheating in a smaller pan. It was spicy hot and went well with the lentil salad (homemade) and lentil rotis (bought at a local farmer's market).

Posted by wjc at 12:43 AM | Permalink

The theme of this month's dinner was starters. Appetizers, tapas, noshes. Stuff you eat before you really eat...

Balancing a dinner like this was as tricky as the comfort food dinner from last month in that there was the possibility of having too much of one type of food (starches for instance...) but everything seemed to work out. I think that the fact that two of the group are vegetarians gives us balance by default.

Jan and I made two tapas: patatas bravas and Spanish chorizo crostini.

The Spanish chorizo we made a few weeks ago was done just for this dinner. This tapa was just a variation on something we had at Iberia in Menlo Park which was crumbled chorizo on a slice of French bread. Our version has Manchego cheese in addition to broiled slices of chorizo. Pretty simple: slice all, assemble and broil.

The patatas bravas was a classic that I first had at one Howard's food parties--he's very fond of tapas...it is essentially a roasted potato dish with tomato sauce and aioli. This was also pretty easy to do with oven roasting chunks of potatoes with olive oil in the oven, making a simple moderately-spicy tomato sauce and a batch of aioli. You could cheat and use canned tomato sauce with some tabasco added but I usually make my own.

The aioli is actualy the most labour intensive part so here's how:
- four cloves of garlic
- kosher salt
- two egg yolks
- one cup of olive oil
- dijon mustard
- lemon juice (1/2 lemon)
- room temp water
- white pepper

1. Mince garlic with a pinch of salt and keep chopping until you achieve a paste-like consistency.
2. Add garlic to the egg yolk (which should be in a small-ish bowl) and whisk to break the yolks.
3. *This is the labour intensive part* Start adding the olive oil drop by drop and whish well after every one...after the yolk starts emulsifying you can add the oil in a thin stream. Keep whisking until all of the oil is incorporated. The mixture should be thick and mayonaise-like.
4. Add a bit of the lemon juice and water to thin. The lemon juice will "whiten" the mixture a bit.
5. Add a small (1/4 tsp) amount of the dijon mustard and white pepper to taste

Just make sure to thin the aioli enough so you can have it flow on top of the potatoes. I used a squirt bottle to finish the dish with the aioli. (See below)

I was in a bit of a dilemma with the potatoes--they started to stick to the pan and didn't brown as well as I had wanted them to. They were soft enough so I took them out of the pan, gently so they wouldn't break them too much, and cooled them slightly on another pan. To give them some colour, I dunked each of the pieces into the tomato sauce and then shook them off so they had a thin coat of sauce. I put them under the broiler for a few minutes to dry and set the sauce on them. Now I had the colour I wanted.

Plating was dead-easy. A layer of potaotes down on the plate, a bit of sauce, another layer of potatoes, more sauce then a drizzle of aioli over the whole thing (the squeeze bottle was very useful for this) and some minced parsley for final garnish.

Next month: diet(!) food

Posted by wjc at 01:03 AM | Permalink