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So various things have happened, personal and travel-related and such, and relatedly or otherwise, I have been neglecting this journal shamefully.
But now we are home again, and I am fully resolved to mend my ways: in pursuit of which mending, one thing I want to do is talk more about food. Especially Thursday food. As you know, Thursday is when friends come around to dine: sometimes half a dozen of 'em, sometimes twice that. It's never a dinner party as such, it's just a chance for them to hang out and for me to show off, or to experiment, or just to stretch myself. It is, in fact, all about me. Unsurprisingly.
Anyway: we've been away, and now we're back, and this is the first Thursday since the interregnum. And as we just spent two weeks in England and I somehow managed not to eat a single curry, guess what I'm cooking tonight?
Specifically, I am cooking the dish I most despise, the dish most laughed at among the soi-disant cognoscenti of the English curry cuisine: I am making chicken korma. And I mean for it to be awesome.
Thing is, chicken korma as served in every British takeaway is essentially curry for people who hate curry: cooked with boneless chicken breast so mildly spiced it might as well have none at all, thick with cream, padded with banana and pineapple and I know not what more. It's what they sell to the old folk who've never crossed the threshold of a curry house before, and to kids who've never so much as put pepper on their eggs.
But it doesn't need to be like that. My chicken korma is going to be redolent with onion cooked sweet and slow, heavy on the ginger and the garlic, flavoured with fennel and coriander. There will be serrano chillies, left whole for those who don't like 'em to pass 'em on to me. The chicken will be dark meat, thighs, and cooked on the bone for better savour. That'll cook with its yogurt marinade and not a hint of dairy more. No cream, no fruit. Ground cashews to thicken the sauce. And there'll be a vegetable curry on the side, and a channa dal, and lemon-rice-without-the-lemon, as is traditional around here.
I'll let you know if anyone storms out.
[EtA: in other news, I had dentistry today. I just wanted to say that, so's you'd understand how radically awesome I am being.]
But now we are home again, and I am fully resolved to mend my ways: in pursuit of which mending, one thing I want to do is talk more about food. Especially Thursday food. As you know, Thursday is when friends come around to dine: sometimes half a dozen of 'em, sometimes twice that. It's never a dinner party as such, it's just a chance for them to hang out and for me to show off, or to experiment, or just to stretch myself. It is, in fact, all about me. Unsurprisingly.
Anyway: we've been away, and now we're back, and this is the first Thursday since the interregnum. And as we just spent two weeks in England and I somehow managed not to eat a single curry, guess what I'm cooking tonight?
Specifically, I am cooking the dish I most despise, the dish most laughed at among the soi-disant cognoscenti of the English curry cuisine: I am making chicken korma. And I mean for it to be awesome.
Thing is, chicken korma as served in every British takeaway is essentially curry for people who hate curry: cooked with boneless chicken breast so mildly spiced it might as well have none at all, thick with cream, padded with banana and pineapple and I know not what more. It's what they sell to the old folk who've never crossed the threshold of a curry house before, and to kids who've never so much as put pepper on their eggs.
But it doesn't need to be like that. My chicken korma is going to be redolent with onion cooked sweet and slow, heavy on the ginger and the garlic, flavoured with fennel and coriander. There will be serrano chillies, left whole for those who don't like 'em to pass 'em on to me. The chicken will be dark meat, thighs, and cooked on the bone for better savour. That'll cook with its yogurt marinade and not a hint of dairy more. No cream, no fruit. Ground cashews to thicken the sauce. And there'll be a vegetable curry on the side, and a channa dal, and lemon-rice-without-the-lemon, as is traditional around here.
I'll let you know if anyone storms out.
[EtA: in other news, I had dentistry today. I just wanted to say that, so's you'd understand how radically awesome I am being.]