fully fed up

My sister has a shockingly beautiful friend named Purnima, which is already a pretty lucky thing to have, and when you consider that she is called Punty, and is the kind of cook whose meals make the people who have eaten them get misty in the recalling, and that she came over recently and gave me a cooking lesson--well, the luckiness factor just multiplies exponentially.

She was planning to teach me how to make a simple fish curry, and she did that.  But even a simple fish curry has a lot of steps. I am reluctant to tell you how to do anything that has a lot of steps, generally.  There are layers and layers of flavor in a good curry, and you do not get those in a snap, unless you buy a jar of what a friend of mine calls Curry In A Hurry, and then you have something, but not anything you would serve to Punty or that would make anyone terribly misty when they recalled it.  This is not to say that some of these jiffy products are not tasty enough to fall back on when you must.  Some of them are.  But they are not what we are talking about.

Punty said she did not learn to cook as a child in India.  She just ate.  But when she moved to the U.S. and found herself to be a homesick and hungry student, she began to try to piece together what she had witnessed and what she was hungry for and to reconstruct it in her little kitchen.  The rest is history.  My nephew cannot speak of Punty's food in public because the weeping compromises his manliness.  "Her breakfast..." he says, and has to clear his throat.  Punty told us a hilarious family story about an Indian gentleman declining an offer of more food by saying politely, "Oh, no, thank you. I am fully fed up."  Max has been fully fed up by Punty more times than he can count, though I think on nights when he can't sleep he is happy to try.

One of the steps on the road to Punty's fantastic curry was the one where she said, "does your family like it hot?" and I said (thinking of the innocent little children) probably not by her standards, and so she said, then we will add only a little pepper.

This is a visual on "only a little pepper," Purnima-style:

Another one of the steps was this paste, which did not take very long to assemble at all, and which is the topic of our discussion today.  "We will make a lot," said Punty, "because it is very useful to have on hand." 

She was right about that.

Here is one thing you can do with this paste: when you melt butter for popcorn, drop a tablespoon of this in there and let it bubble a bit.  You would never (or anyway, I would never, no matter what you suspect) make garlic and ginger paste as part of the process of producing a bowl of popcorn.  If you happen to have a jar of it lurking in the condiment forest of your refrigerator, however, you have this kind of option before you.  And then you also have this kind of popcorn. Salt it as liberally as you generally would, and maybe get a little nutritional yeast on there.  Never look back.

Here is another, perhaps more useful thing you can do with it.  Make a fast and fantastic and pretty memorable for a weekday curry for dinner.  Curry in a hurry, Punty-style.  With a pot of rice, you are set to jet.

the paste

a head of garlic, peeled

about 3" of fresh ginger root, peeled (peel it with a teaspoon--it will change your life)

1 small hot pepper, seeded (a jalapeño, for example)

Coarsely chop the ginger and the pepper, using all proper and prudent precautions regarding not touching your eyes or other tender areas after touching the pepper.  Put all three ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to combine, and then really mince the hell out of them.  Maybe add a little water if you need it to get things moving.  You want a smooth and uniform paste. Put it in a glass jar with a tight lid, and keep it in the fridge for up to two weeks, if you can manage to hang on to it for that long. 

the curry in a hurry

about 3T of canola oil, ghee, butter, or coconut oil

about 2T of ginger-garlic paste

about a T of curry powder

about a pound of chicken breast, chopped, or tofu, cubed

about half a cup of half and half or coconut milk

about half a cup of chicken broth or water

salt to taste

a large handful of baby spinach

a large handful of chopped cilantro (or not, if you hate it)

Heat the oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat.  Add the paste and stir it around for about five minutes, letting it golden up a little but not brown at all.  Add the curry powder and stir a few times.  Doesn't that smell nice?  Add the protein and sear it well on all sides.  Now add the liquids and simmer a few minutes, scraping all the tasty stuck bits off the bottom as you go and letting the sauce thicken a bit.  Throw in the green things and the salt, and taste.

saucy little tarts

 

Would you like to know the secret to making good pie?  Well, don't ask me.  I make lousy pie, so I can't help you with that. What I can help you with, thanks to a devious workaround in my bag of tricks, is diverting attention—yours and anyone else’s--from your lack of pie-making skills.

In my entirely unsolicited opinion, whomsoever came up with the phrase “easy as pie” has a little bit to answer for.  It’s easy as pie for me to make a cardboard crust that stays raw underneath the fruit but burns on the edges.  Easy as pie to underfill the thing so that the top crust collapses AND to overfill it so it blurps all over the oven.  It’s easy as pie for me to imagine I can flute and lattice and, heaven help us, stencil a pie crust, but tough as nails to translate that into reality on the plate.

There is nothing like a pie, in my experience, to bring a person’s lofty fantasies regarding their personal superpowers sharply down to terra firma.  Although I did just offer to make a wedding cake for some friends who are getting married in November, and I have a consequent hunch that in fact there IS something like a pie for that purpose.  My oldest child has quietly requested that she be allowed to live somewhere else while I am constructing the cake.  Wise girl.

But pie.  Do you long to pass for a pie-maker, and feel pretty hot about yourself into the bargain?  We can address this desire.

Cue the trumpets!  Enter, stage left, Julia Child!  Why, what is that she is carrying?  I think it is a galette.  Galette is a French word meaning “just as yummy as pie and no trouble to make.”  This recipe comes from Baking with Julia and I have tweaked it only a little bit.  To revert to the original, leave out the whole wheat flour and use all white flour.  The cornmeal gives it plenty of textural interest.  But I like the nuttiness of a little whole wheat in here, especially with the plums.  Which reminds me that it is a recipe for a BERRY galette, in the book.  But I had plums.  And really you could use any fruit at all.  Or make a savory one with tomatoes and herbs and cheese.

Here are two reasons to love the original recipe, other than the tasty food that results from it: one, when it instructs you to cut in the butter until some pieces are the size of small peas and some are finer, an explanation is given.  “The finer bits will make it tender, and the larger ones will make it flaky.”  I love that kind of insider info.  Teach a man to fish, and so forth. Later on, after you’ve added the liquid, you’re told, “it will be a soft, malleable dough—the kind you might be tempted to overwork.”  Mmm hmm.  It’s like they were watching me.

This is not a very sweet dessert at all, meaning you get carte blanche (that’s also French, for “a little more wrist action on that scoop, there”) with the ice cream.

Parchment paper is your ally here.  Absolutely essential.  Don't leave home without it.  The almond paste fillip came to me in a flash; I used to put a little bit of minute tapioca in there, to keep the juices from getting too runny (even though Julia and her friends said nothing about this; runniness does not worry them), but the tapioca that clings to the fruit on top doesn't cook properly, and tweezing those bits of tapioca off cuts into my golf time.  Adding the almond paste is good because it is yum, and because it drinks up all the fruit juices while all around it stays crisp, but it's hardly essential—to anything other than your “CHECK.  ME.  OUT.” feeling of happiness, that is.  Yeah, that’s right.  We got swagger.  We ain’t afraid of no PIE.

galette of whatever pleases you

adapted from Baking With Julia

3 T sour cream, yogurt or buttermilk

1/3  c ice water (about)

¾ c all purpose flour

¼ c whole wheat flour

¼ c cornmeal

1-2 t sugar

½ t salt

7T cold unsalted butter, cut in cubes

3 c fruit, sliced

1-2T sugar

1 t grated fresh ginger

1 7oz tube almond paste

1 T cold unsalted butter, cut in slivers

1 T heavy cream

1 tsp sugar

In a small bowl, mix together the sour cream and the water until totally combined.

In a medium bowl, combine the dry ingredients.  Toss the butter in there, and use a fork to coat the pieces in the flour mixture. Using a pastry blender, cut the butter in, making sure to leave some bits more or less pea-sized. Now splash in most of the liquid mixture and use the fork to toss it all around.  Pinch a bit of the dough; if it holds together, gather the whole mess into a ball; if not, add the remaining liquid.  If it still seems dry, add water by the teaspoon until it comes together.  Once you have gathered it all up, divide the ball in two and form a disk from each half.  Refrigerate for at least half an hour.

When you are ready to bake, take the dough out of the fridge.  Let it enjoy the room’s temperature while you mix the fruit and sugar and ginger in a small bowl.  Heat the oven to 400 degrees, and have two squares of parchment and two baking sheets at the ready.

Sprinkle a little flour on the parchment, and plop a disk of dough on there.  Cover with a sheet of wax paper, and roll out to about ¼ “ thick.  Think about a circle as you are rolling, but don’t invest a moment’s thought into whether or not you achieve one.  A rustic ovoid will serve. Rough edges are good, too.  Take about a third of the almond paste and pat and poink it out (or use your rolling pin, but that means another two sheets of wax paper) to a rough circle that will rest on the dough with a comfortable margin all the way around.  Plop half the fruit on top of that, in a single layer, again leaving a wide margin.

Now, we have some fun.  Using the parchment paper, fold one section of the dough up over the fruit.  

Work your way around the circumference, folding up with the paper.  

 

Why, lookee there!  You are pleating your way to magazine-readiness and not even breaking a sweat. 
  

Round you go.  Very nice.

And there you have it.

Dot the exposed surface of the fruit with slivers of the butter.  Brush the top side of the pleats with a little heavy cream.  Sprinkle a teaspoon or so of sugar over that.

Repeat these steps with the second disk of dough, just absolutely digging that pleating thing now that you have it down.

Bake 30-40 minutes, until quite golden brown, and slide the parchment onto a rack to cool for as long as you can restrain yourself.

moves like rumpelstiltskin

There are a number of ninja moves one can pull off in the kitchen, but the kind that make me happiest involve innovative re-purposing.  Hang on a second while I run this thread through my neighbors' trash.  My house pets--the ones that are supposed to live in the house, the canines, not the invading chicken--are so devoted to my well-being that they rarely miss an opportunity to provide creative distraction from my cares and woes.  Just as recently as last week, when I had already driven to the dentist myself, 90 minutes there and back RIGHT PAST THE VET, they said to themselves, "more--she needs more soothing driving time," and valiantly rammed their faces into the business section of the nearest porcupine.  And as a measure of their commitment to my well-being, this was not the first and not even the second but the THIRD time (oh, the devotion!  the care!) that they have sacrificed their own comfort by having dozens of porcupine quills run through their lips, nostrils and tongues. I must lay my burden down on these occasions, and drive with two frantic, drooling, whimpering numbskulls who are desperate to climb into my lap in their mindless (there, I said it) pursuit of relief. You try driving with a writhing pincushion smashing its slobbery self into your elbow--see if you can recall any care or woe outside the vehicle.  It's effective, is all I am saying.  If I could have simply applied the $200 directly to their faces to save the fun of the drive, I surely would have.  If I could have arranged to have a brain transplant (installation?) performed as long as they were under anesthesia, you can bet I would have done that, too.  But I digress.  Just before L'Affaire Porcupine, prior to hitting on that masterful plan to redirect my attention, they punted with a trip to the neighbors' house to root through the garbage.  I am here to report that you should always have rubber gloves handy, and that you can learn a lot when you handle, personally, all the items from two bags of trash that have been spread on a lawn. 

People throw away a lot of food, is my point.  Eating a lot of trash can keep a dog up at night with thirst and indigestion--that is another point I could make.  Any disturbance of my rest by nightmares or the difficulty in finding a comfortable sleep position was thoughtfully circumnavigated by the Rescue Hounds, who moaned and whimpered and panted and so forth at regular enough intervals that all risk of sleeping was removed.  

But the throwing away of food--that was where I was going.

I like to avoid that, when I can.  I like to make stock from bones and peelings.  I like to infuse the stems of things I have cooked the leaves of.  And I really, really like it when with almost zero effort, I can turn something I would have previously overlooked into something supremely tasty.

The arrival of the real strawberries here is big news.  It comes astonishingly quickly after spring gets underway (I can never understand how a strawberry plant gets organized to leaf out and produce a ripe berry before I have even remembered where the summer hats are stored), overwhelms us with its magnificence, and passes by even more rapidly.  It is my fervent hope I'll get to the PYO field this week before the season is totally over, as we muscle through a lot of frozen strawberries over winter (by which I mean a lot, oh yes, a lot.)

Meantime, I have forked over the cash for these beauties:

and while carving them up for table use, I employed a trick my sister taught me.  As you pare and hull, toss the trimmings into a large carafe, pitcher or jar instead of the compost or trash.  Fill the pitcher with water, and stow it in the fridge.  When it is totally chilled, you will have one of the more refreshing beverages known to humankind.  You can sweeten it if you like, but I find that is not required.  The satisfaction of the whole straw-into-gold thing is sweet reward enough.

Kind of like the devotion of a loving pal.