desperance

Bless me, internets, for I have skimped; it has been two days since my last KD entry. I neglected entirely to tell you about feeding the yogis on Monday night, how I made saag gosht without the saag and actually probably not gosht either because not lamb, and how I had to make another curry because of apricots, and...

Let me try this-all in another order.

Jeannie brought me apricots. I was going to make an apricot cake, only I lacked ground almonds which they call almond flour over here, and there was none in the store, and I probably couldn't be bothered to grind my own because I have done that and it's a pain. So then I had apricots loose in my head as I mulched around the store; but I had already picked up beef for dinner, so it was too late to go the lamb-and-apricot route. But chicken-and-apricot is also good, and I could pick up a tin of coconut milk and make a Thai-like curry to go alongside the beef-and-spinach that I intended.

Only when I got home I had forgotten the spinach; but I still had a lot of green coriander/cilantro, and I have a Lost Recipe in my head, from a book that seems to have vanished utterly from human ken and/or my library. It was an Indian green curry, where the green came entirely from herbs; I suspect it was lamb/cilantro/mint, but I may never know. Every now and then, I try to recreate it from first principles. So I made a beef curry with lots of cilantro, and a chicken curry with coconut and apricots - and if anyone has the trick of cooking things in coconut milk without the oil separating out, do please share it, because I surely do not have it, no.

Last night Karen and I ate leftovers, viz the beef-and-sweet-potato tagine with a warm red cabbage salad that I really rather liked, and sesame-roasted potatoes that we both adored. Tonight Dave and Katherine are here, and I'm going to make a big bowl of rice and we'll just eat everything else that's left over in the fridge, with dollops of pickle and chutney and sour cream and harissa and whatever. Yum. And then we will have cleaned out the fridge too, which is an act of virtue.

In other food-related newses, my Hobart KitchenAid vintage mixer has left Arizona and is currently in LA. I do love tracking. Even though it gives me yet more opportunities to twitch: it's been sitting there in the Bell Gardens depot for 25 hours! Exactly! What are they doing? Why isn't it moving? Do they have no trucks, planes, personnel...?

Yesterday I wanted to cook chicken for dinner; so I went back to The Prettiest Little Cookbook in California(TM), aka Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume, and found a recipe that I was happy not so much to follow as to stroll along beside, as I do (in a sort of "well, I don't have any of that, so I'll do this instead; and put these things in the salad, rather than those; and do the potatoes my way, of course, not yours, Silvena..." and like that). But the recipe called for chicken breasts, and I have no truck with that, I bought a whole chicken; and detached what a retailer would call the crown, viz the breasts still on the ribcage, which left the legs-and-wings-and-back-and-parson's-nose all of another piece. Which I laid skin-side-up on a baking tray and put on a lower shelf of the oven with nothing but a grind of salt and pepper over it while I baked the crown above in mustard and sugar and orange juice, as per recipe, more or less.

And dinner was really nice, but what I am most pleased by is the trayful beneath, which came out looking flat and golden and crispy and delicious, and reminded me of something - which I have now tracked down, and it is the flattened dried salted ducks that Chinese groceries sell as discs, as per this photo (which I ganked from this website, which promotes a place called Cabramatta, which is in New South Wales, very close to a town called Chipping Norton, which is almost certainly entirely unlike the town called Chipping Norton very close to which I was educated, in so far as etc etc):



Which ducks I used to see in Newcastle, and somehow never quite bought, shame on me; but thinking about them did lead me to write a story long ago in the waybackwhen, "One For Every Year He's Away, She Said," which was published in a magazine that rose and died quite promptly, so that I never can actually remember what it was called; but I do have a copy, and I do mean to scan or rekey the story (of course I no longer have an electronic text, no: it was, what, fifteen years ago? Whatever format I wrote it in, under whatever system; whatever medium I stored it on: long gone or inaccessible. People, learn from me. Archive. Archive and organise and keep track. And make sure that you will still be able to read your archives. I have thoroughly labelled disks in accessible formats and I still can't read them, because they're WordStar or early WordPerfect and my current systems don't even remember hearing about those) and republish it. Along with everything else that I mean to do. That I thought I would be doing, now that I have no current contract and nothing more obvious to be getting on with. Hey-ho. I am myself something of a flat chicken, apparently.