The Further Culinary Misadventures of a Faudie

Since the kiddo's been at Nana and Papa's house, Thursdays at Chez Boeckman-Walker have become a sort of Indian feast night. Thursdays are usually best for really experimenting in the kitchen because I don't spend two hours at the gym that morning, we don't have a grocery run to make that evening and the leftovers are usually down to slim pickings. So why not make a big damn mess all in the name of dining--it's not like I've got anything better to do. (And the FSM knows there's nothing on TV to watch that evening, so I have plenty of time for cleaning up afterwards.)

Let me just say this about yesterday afternoon/evening's culinary misadventure: Somewhere, millions of Indian women are laughing at me. Madhur Jaffrey is laughing loudest of all. No, wait. I'm laughing loudest of all.

Misstep One -- Recipalooza
The first step for any culinary misadventure is to start things off on the wrong foot: Start preparing ingredients for the wrong damn recipe.

My first experiment was to be sambar since we had a pair of idlis and medu vada that I'd absconded from Madras Pavilion during our last visit. (I know, it's wrong to secret away food from an all-you-can-eat buffet, but I needed to have time to study them closer without looking like some kind of weirdo in public. It has nothing to do with wanting something to munch on during our second viewing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or with my inability--yet--to make these yummies at home! Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) And ya have to have sambar with these treats. The disastrous onion chutney I made during my first blogged-about culinary misadventure would have been lonely without some sambar.

Anywho, I'd found sambar recipes in both Jaffrey's World Vegetarian book and in one of my more recent (thank you, Sur La Table, for putting several of your books on sale at half price) acquisitions, Easy Indian Cooking by Suneeta Vaswani. Wednesday evening, I'd had the chance to look at the pair more closely and had opted not to make the Vaswani recipe because hers was a more stew-like sambar, where I wanted the broth-like version, which is what MP serve (and I could live on, I swear). No slight to Vaswani, though, since the main course, sindhi chicken curry, came from her book.

Because I'm anal and had set out all the ingredients I needed for the curry and the sambar (and the two chocolate-hazelnut no-bake cookie recipes I was hoping to make from my fabulous King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion book) meant that I had a portion of my counter space covered with culinary literature, cans and little Ziplocks of spices. Naturally, being the chemically enhanced blonde that I am and coming off a four-hour cleaning fugue, I grabbed Vaswani's book, opened to its sambar recipe and happily started preparing half a cup of masoor dal. By the time the things were picked over, rinsed and in the pot, I realized I was using the wrong damn recipe.

Since Jaffrey's sambar calls only for a cup of toor dal (or toovar dal, as she calls 'em), I split the difference and threw in half a cup of toor dal to my half-cup of masoor dal. Sure, it wasn't right, but it wasn't like I was going to let that masoor dal go to waste. Once ya got those split peas washed, ya can't exactly put them back in the bag.

Misstep Two -- Misuse Time-Saving Devices
Monday afternoon, my new Cuisinart three-cup food processor (got it for half-price and paid no shipping--woohoo!) arrived at Greg's office, yet I had to wait until Thursday to play with it. (I know--that's some serious suffering.) So what do I choose first to put into the cute little thing? No, not carrots for carrot halwa or cabbage for cabbage poriyal, two recipes that convinced me I needed a food processor to make properly.

No, I threw in a humble yellow onion. Two of 'em, actually.

The curry called for two cups of finely chopped onions. I wound up with about two cups (never measured it) of minced-to-almost-the-point-of-puree onion because, heh, I haven't really a clue how to use a food processor. (Imagine that!) Reading the instructions make operating the device seems so...simple and straightforward. Heh, leave it to me to screw up the simple and straightforward!

But I'll say this: Even though using it to finely chop onions was a disaster, I love my food processor if for only one reason: cleaning it up is a snap compared to that damn blender. Cuisinart provides a special spatula (i.e., rubber scraper) that works like a charm, and the work bowl doesn't have that awful cone-like shape of the blender pitcher, so food doesn't pool far beneath the blade like it does on the blender.

I was this close to using the processor to chop the fresh cilantro (3/4 cup) I needed for the curry, but...well, I figured I didn't want to kill the romance I was enjoying with the device by butchering cilantro.

Speaking of cilantro, I never realized until this Wednesday's weekly Wednesday burrito night and last night's curry adventure how wonderful fresh cilantro is. Until now, I'd always thought the dried stuff we bought from Central Markup or Hole (in the head for buying this stuff at this price) Foods was fine. But no! Fresh has all the flavor and more! As I was chopping at it, I was reminded of the time when the Hoov Editorial department sprung for Chipotle burritos for the entire department; I kept hearing the voice of one of my coworkers lament that Chipotle opted to use "that foul weed" in its rice. Ahh, Ryan delivered that line with such disdain and aplomb!

(And Melissa, I totally understand now why you were lamenting the delay of your salad spinner's arrival in Israel. As I learned from watching...some blonde in a kitchen on Food Network two Fridays ago, you can use those things to quickly dry fresh herbs prior to chopping--which is a must if yer gonna throw 'em into a food processor. Since I have no spinner, I had no way of quickly drying my cilantro, thus I chopped it by hand. But I'm still not quite ready to put a spinner on my culinary want list.)

Misstep Three -- Risk Bodily Harm
Live dangerously: Cook topless. That's all I'm going to say.

Misstep Four -- Tempt the Tamarind Paste of Doom
Since I have several recipes that call for tamarind paste, I shelled out a few bucks (ooh, big spender!) for a block of what's identified as tamarind paste.

Except that what I bought, as I learned from Jaffrey in World Vegetarian, isn't really paste. It's almost paste that you have to tear into small pieces, soak in boiling water and then press ("with the back of a wooden spoon or your fingers") through a sieve to yield paste. Woohoo, so it's an almost-convenience food product!

Because I wanted to be adventurous and take the hard, rutty road to culinary discovery, I opted not to use the lemon juice substitute Jaffrey includes in her sambar recipe and instead plunged into really preparing the tamarind paste. She includes (mercifully) instructions for prepping the paste bits in the microwave--and at that time of day, I was all about convenience. So I tear off a hunk from the tamarind block that I think will yield the two tablespoons of tamarind paste I need, then tear it into little bits, toss them into a microwave Grab It (remember those Corning Visionware ones?), add two cups of water as Jaffrey advises, put the lid on and then nuke the life outta that stuff for four minutes (based on Jaffrey's recommendation of three to five minutes).

Heh, let's just say this: I was rewarded with the opportunity to finally scrub out the lingering ground clove stench from my disastrous microwave carrot halwa from the first weekend of June.

I guess I didn't have the lid completely sealed. Or the boiling water managed to unseat the lid. Regardless of how it happened, all the water (or most of it) overflowed from the Grab It and onto the bottom of the microwave. There were bits of tamarind stuck to the glass tray and to the side walls. And tamarind, my friends, isn't exactly the sweetest-smelling stuff in the world. Combine its odor with three-week-old parfum de clove, and ya have yourself a righteous stench. That I put off fully cleaning up until I had me my two tablespoons of paste--which came out just fine, I'm happy to report. Score one success!

Funny thing about microwaves--I used to be deadly afraid of 'em. Wouldn't touch 'em. If I did, I'd hit the button and dash to the other end of the house. Neurotic? Yes, but for good reason. I was at Graga's house one time, and someone (Graga or one of my younger cousins--can't remember who) was nuking either a frozen slice of pizza or popcorn. Something happened that caused that glass tray to shatter, and that explosion of glass left quite an impression. Plus there's that whole "radiation" thing (I'm a child of the 80s--I know all about living in fear of the nukes). But now the microwave and I are best buds. And I have a clean one to boot.

Misstep Five -- Beware of Popping Mustard
When the recipe warns you that the mustard seeds you're sauting in hot canola oil will start popping within seconds, it's not kidding.

And removing the saute pan from the heat when the seeds start popping everywhere while you fumble to add the dried red chile and curry leaves? That doesn't stop the popping.

So much for my freshly mopped kitchen floor....

And thank the FSM that I threw on my old (but recently bleached back to whiteness) Dean & DeLuca apron before I threw in the seeds!

(Ahh, anyone else remember dear neurotic little Felicity?)

Misstep Six -- Wind Up With Food That's Almost Inedible
Aside from the mix-up with the dal and replacing the four shallots with half a yellow onion, I followed the sambar recipe as precisely as I could--and still wound up with a final product that was largely inedible. Not because I'd burned it or undercooked it or whatever. But the heat was just...well, hot. Damn hot.

And when your husband, who's not as tolerant of spicey heat as you are, overhears you say, "Damn, that's hot!" when you test it again in his presence, you know you're in trouble because you just made yourself a big pot of this-porridge-is-too-hot sambar that you're going to be eating solo because you know you can't bring yourself to just throw it out because that's just damn wasteful and your family doesn't have food or money to waste like that because you're out of work and are too prissy to get a regular 9 to 6 job because you think you need time to work out and play in the kitchen.

So I wound up adding a small carton (looks like a friggin' juice box) of roasted red pepper and tomato soup to the sambar in an attempt to tone it down just a wee bit. I figured that might help--or at least couldn't ruin it too much--since the sambar we enjoy at MP has bits of tomato and bits of green bell pepper in it, so a soup from red bell pepper and tomato out to be okay, right? And it didn't. Greg managed a few bites; unsurprisingly, he was stopped by the presence of the dal. (He has really got to get over his fear of legumes.)

All in all, this misadventure wasn't too big a disaster. Sure, I shouldn't have tried to warm up the idlis and medu vadas and naan on the pepper roaster balanced precariously over the five-quart casserole dish in which I'd made the curry. But at least my latest attempt at mango lassi wan't the unsuckable brew it was last time! I remembered to throw in a pinch of ground cardamom and a bit of rose water, just as I'd read in some recipes. (Yes, I'm cannibalizing recipes again.) And if I'd had more mango prepared, they might have been more mango-y and less kefir/milk blend-y. And the onion chutney wasn't too bad in comparison to the sambar. Flavor is all relative, right? Right?

I ended this misadventure with this revelation: I may never be a great cook, but I'm learning how to clean up a kitchen like nobody's business!