curry love
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).