and things went downhill from there

Today on Cooking with plonq:

I have been wanting something curried for lunch or dinner for the past week or so, but it didn't fit with any of our meal plans for dinner, and I've been eating mostly leftovers for lunch.

When I was poking around for some lunch ideas today, I started mulling on ideas for a lentil curry when I remembered that we had a couple of chicken thighs in the freezer downstairs. I brought them upstairs, tossed them into a bowl of warm water to thaw a bit, and then started prepping other things.

I rough-chopped half an onion and tossed it into a pot with a tablespoon or so of cooking oil. While that cooked, I fetched a knob of ginger from the fridge and coarsely minced it up, followed by two cloves of garlic. When they were all roughly chopped, I gathered both of them together into a pile and continued chopping them until the onions were cooked enough to be ready for them.

I stirred them in with the onion and then cubed up the still-mostly-frozen chicken thighs. While I waited for those to finish thawing and cook through, I mixed up a cup of warm water with some chicken bullion and a couple tablespoons of powdered coconut milk. Next, I started a second pot on the stove with a cup of water, half a cup of rice, a pinch of salt, and a bit more of the coconut milk powder.

While the rice and chicken cooked, I added a splash of fish sauce to the coconut milk mixture and then started hunting for the red Thai curry paste. Which we don't have. That gave me a moment's pause before I shifted gears and grabbed the Madras curry powder instead. I dumped a good tablespoon of that in with the (now cooked) chicken and stirred it a bit to cook the edge off the curry, then I dropped in two frozen balls of spinach. After a moment or two of waffling, I ended up following the spinach with a good shake of red chilli flakes.

When the spinach was mostly thawed, I stirred in the coconut mixture and let it come to a gentle boil before reducing it to a simmer. I gave it a taste and then tweaked it a bit with about a teaspoon of sugar and two crushed cardamom pods. I was going to toss in some raisins when I spotted the dried cranberries. To my mind, they would accomplish the same function and add a nice bit of colour to the dish.

I added about a tablespoon of cornstarch to the curry to thicken it up, and then let it simmer on low heat until the rice was done. As soon as the rice was ready, I folded some black sesame seeds and a splash of orange blossom water into it.

I scooped the rice into a bowl, hollowed out the centre, and scooped in about half of the curry (the rest went into the fridge). I garnished it with another shake of chilli flakes, and some fresh parsley from the basement.

Prognosis: this was really good. Mild, and packed with flavour. The cranberries turned out to be a great addition.



On a side note: I will continue cross-posting all of my entries to both Livejournal and Dreamwidth, but given the current situation with Livejournal's owners, I can't guarantee the continued availability that site.

As always, anything you see on LJ is also available on Dreamwidth under the user-name "Plonq"

One of the things we have changed since the start of the pandemic is that we waste far less food. It's not that we have some kind of renewed appreciation for food, but that we're eating at home much more than we used to (no dining out), so we tend to use things before they get a chance to spoil. Also, since we don't just go shopping on a whim now, we are more prone to using that last bit of stale bread rather than binning it when we pick up a fresh loaf.

Obviously, I have never considered throwing away the inedible parts of food to be waste. I typically don't eat apple cores and banana peels.

Note my use of the word "typically"...

I was watching a British cooking channel on YouTube recently where one of the chefs created a curry using banana peels for the base. Prior to that video, the thought of banana peels belonging anywhere but the compost bin had never crossed my mind. The recipe they used seemed a bit fiddly, so I found a simpler one and replicated their technique. I tossed the peels into a pot of water along with a good helping of turmeric, brought it too a boil and then let it slowly cool for about an hour before I removed the peels, pared them to about 3cm lengths and then cut them into strips.

I threw them into a wok along with some sliced onions and other fixings of a curry, serving the result over rice that I had coloured with turmeric.


It was really good. A bit spicier than I had intended, but I'll adjust that on my next try. Both the flavour and texture were quite pleasant. If I hadn't known what went into this curry, I'd never have guessed that it was a tasty vegetarian curry of some kind, but I'd never have figured out what was being used as the base. This is on my list of things to try again.

Also on the subject of experimental foods that I am going to make again...

I've been itching to try making vegan pulled-pork ever since I learned that it was a thing. I've had mixed luck with vegan recipes in the past, so I approached this with tempered expectations.

The result was astounding. If I hadn't known what went into this, one could have fooled me if they served this to me as the real thing. As a bonus, it was no more work than making the genuine product.

There was still a bit left in the fridge this morning, so I tossed a bagel in the toaster and used the last of the "pork" to make a breakfast sandwich.


This recipe shared a thing in common with the banana-peel curry in that it was hotter than I'd intended. The recipe called for cayenne, but I substituted an equal amount of hot paprika. It turns out that the latter is hotter than the former would have been, and this stuff packs a bite. Since it could have used a hint more smoke anyway, the next time I make it, I will substitute smoked paprika for the cayenne. More smoke, less fire.

The chicken guy at the farmers' market yesterday changed up his pattern for the final market of the year, and offered breasts and thighs for sale instead of whole chickens. As with all of this fare, they were free range and enormous. The breasts came two to a pack, so atara put one in the freezer, and I cut up the other to make Thai curry.

Red Thai chicken has become a cold-weather staple in our house, and over time I have honed the recipe to be consistently good.

Last night should have been no exception, but something went horribly wrong. One of the tricks I use when making the curry is to reserve some of the coconut milk and mix it with the curry paste so that we don't get little surprise lumps of the past hiding in the final dish. I was feeling a bit impish last night and decided to mix in an extra amount of the sauce to see if I could bring a sweat to atara's brow at dinner.

I could tell that something was wrong with my first bite. My usual method for estimating the flavour and heat of this dish is based on its colour. The colour of the curry suggested that it should have been full-flavoured, with a mild burn, but the dish was flavourless and bland. At first I thought maybe it was just me, but after we had been eating in relative silence for a minute or so, atara finally asked, "How much curry paste did you put in this?"

In the end, I went back and added the rest of the jar to the curry, but all it seemed to do was darken the colour without adding any flavour or zing. We have bought this brand of paste before, and it was pretty good, so I wondered if we had just got a bad jar. I looked up online comments about the sauce after dinner, and I found that others were complaining about the same thing.

"This paste used to be really good, but now it is bland and flavourless."

Note to future self: do not buy this brand again.


In other news, I am stuck doing on-call support though work this weekend. To that end I got to spend 3+ hours on a conference call that started just around midnight my time and run until about 3:00 (well, 2:00 after the time change). On the plus side, everything ran perfectly and we got kudos from the managing director. On the downside, I was on a conference call until 3:00 this morning.

I got a call from work later in the morning (closer to 10) asking about a report that has apparently not run in a couple of days. I dug around until I got stumped, then called one of our server administrators and picked his brain. We finally managed to track down the reports, but we could not find anything wrong at our end. Eventually I called back the operations centre and asked them if they could contact the business and coax more details out of them.

When he got back to me he said, "Oh, apparently they figured out it's not at your end, but with HP. They've opened a ticket with the vendor."

Gee, thanks for telling us that earlier. There's another hour out of my weekend that I will never get back.

Finally, on another front...

I am rediscovering what a pain in the hindquarters it can be to configure a new phone from scratch; it made me appreciate anew just how many services I am subscribed to. I finally got my my email servers configured today, so my phone should be fully functional now. I am going to power down the old one and see if the new one is catching everything now.