September usually feels like resurrection, climbing out of the entombment of the dog days of August. This year, the August heat continued into the first two weeks of September. Welcome to the rest of my life: in a few years, I’ll be commenting on how welcome the cooling of fall is in October, when it finally starts.
But in any event, this weekend here was that glorious first moment when fall really is in the air: the days suddenly stay around the mid-70s Fahrenheit and drop gently into the low 50s overnight. The mosquitoes are still around but suddenly slightly hesitant. The leaves are beginning their long glory.
Suddenly, yes, I do want to sit out back and read for a while. Suddenly I want to do more protracted cooking outside. So yesterday I made paella.
Paella is something I basically do on my own now, though over the years, I’ve used a lot of recipes, including the “Paella of the Land” and “Paella of the Sea” ones in the NYT Cooking app. (The comments on both recipes are peak NYT Cooking responses, ranging from people sternly criticizing the authors for their inauthenticity to people talking about how the recipes work so much better if you use grits and tofu, and so on.) It’s always a glorious opportunity to sit with a glass of wine and add the saffron broth bit by bit as more of the ingredients go in the mix. Last night’s, with potatoes, chicken thighs and chorizo in it, didn’t quite crust up as much as I like but it was otherwise just as I want it.
Today I think I’m going to make lamb vindaloo.
Vindaloo is one of those recipes that I will occasionally order in a mediocre suburban Indian restaurant and I always end up regretting it. You can tell it’s just a bunch of food service cans with some old spice mix tossed in. It’s always sold on the menu as being really spicy-hot and it never is: it’s a schtick, a way to lure somebody in who fancies himself invulnerable to heat.
I order it occasionally because I’ve had two versions of it in excellent Indian restaurants that I can still remember. It’s nothing extraordinary even at its best, but when it’s really good, it’s one of the better versions of a meat stew, with a ton of pungency.
There’s a reason it’s a familiar sort of stew. Vindaloo is one of those dishes that underscores that simplistic critiques of cultural appropriation wither in relationship to the complexity of history: it’s essentially a South Asian flavor profile transforming a Southern European style of cooking inflected through the need to slow cook dried or salted meat, all coming together through the early morning Portuguese presence in Goa.
This is a dish that I have to look at a number of recipes for just to settle on the spice mixture that I want to toast and then to use to marinate the lamb. That’s going to happen in just a bit, since I want it to be marinating for 4 or 5 hours before a slow cook later today.
I’ll also be making chapatis, using the recipe from Dishoom, and a cucumber-tomato salad with some of the last of the summer’s best tomatoes. Late summer is good for some things, after all, even if not sitting out in the back reading.
How’s the Dishoom cookbook? We had a couple of fantastic meals there on vacation in London last month, and I’ve been thinking about getting the book.