Just in case you were wondering, I didn’t freeze to death last week, nor did I have to stay in a hotel. The furnace got fixed as evening fell, thank goodness. But to be honest, a sleepless night before and a full day of miserable huddling underneath a mount of sweaters pretty well reduced me to minimum capabilities for the end of the week. (I got into a mental doomloop about what the problem with the furnace might be and somewhere around 2am my fretting brain decided the house was flooding with carbon monoxide even though it wasn’t and that was it for sleeping.)
Warmed up and back to normal, I started off the weekend testing whether I could improvise in a South Asian profile without having to look anything up. I took some of a green tikka masala spice blend sold by Burlap and Barrel, branded for Floyd Cardoz, the well-known chef who died in 2020 from covid-19, and decided to use it to flavor a yogurt marinade for chicken thighs. I cooked the spice a little with onion and ginger in butter (I was out of garlic, unfortunately) and added some extra turmeric for looks as well as some salt and a bit of my fermented hot sauce. Then I plopped whole bone-in thighs into the marinade—I added a bit of lime zest and some peanut oil to the yogurt and the aromatics.
As long as I was at the half-ass-your-way-through-cooking, I also decided to make some lentils with some paneer cheese I had around. And then what the heck, to take the little flavorful bananas I had (sweeter than plantains, but not as much as the standard variety) and make a few little savory banana fritters.
I think the mistake on the chicken was deciding to oven roast them with a fair amount of the marinade clinging to them—that essentially turned into a braise. I think it would have been better fried, broiled or grilled, there was something textural I didn’t quite like about the outcome in this case. Also I ended up feeling that the marinade needed something else—acid or sweetness or maybe just a lot more butter. It wasn’t the best I’ve ever done, but it wasn’t bad. The lentils were fine, too. The fritters were just bland, so something there just didn’t work. I can whip up a fritter batter fine without having to reference it but there just wasn’t any flavor to these.
My next bit of half-assing came out better. I had a small bit of salmon, some leftover bacon, and a surplus of eggs, so I decided to make salmon fried rice. That’s not a challenging dish: I make fried rice without any need for reference. But I decided to take a leap and use some black rice I’d picked up on impulse a few months ago.
I’ve cooked with black rice before and one of the tricky things is that some of it is very glutinous and some of it isn’t, and that isn’t always clear from the packaging. It wasn’t clear this time. It turns out it was glutinous, which I think complicates fried rice, because ideally if you’re not using leftover rice, you want it to be cooked and rather dry.
But I was pretty committed by the time the rice was cooking in the Insta-Pot, so I did what I could. Black rice, by the way, is really actually rather purple—the cooking water will look like a dark purple wine, which is pretty relevant when you let the steam come up out of a pressure cooker and walk away. You will come back and say, “Does anybody remember when we threw half a wine bottle’s contents at the cabinet and kitchentop? Because apparently we did.”
It actually fried pretty well, forming a different kind of crust than a day-old jasmine or basmati rice might, with a sweetness that was intriguing in the final outcome. Plus it definitely had the dramatic look on service that I was hoping for. So at this point I was running 50-50 for the weekend.
To move my average into winning territory, I went with a no-brainer: pork chops cooked with apples and then finished with a sort of red-eye gravy—normally you make it after cooking ham, with leftover coffee, broth, and maybe wine. I realized afterwards why ham is the big deal there, because its saltiness and smokiness keeps the coffee flavor’s bitterness from overwhelming the gravy.
It didn’t quite overwhelm this one but it came through more strongly than I expected. I was a little disappointed that the sweetness and tartness of the apples cooked in the pork fat didn’t come through more intensely—I almost wish I’d mashed them up into the gravy itself.
A couple of weeks back, I decided to learn more about cumin. This time I finally decided to look up the science of why apples brown when they’re sliced and why lemon juice stops the reaction. I turns out I’m in a big crowd of people who’ve decided to find out the answer after wondering for a long time. (I liked this parent’s science experiment.) It’s such a basic thing once you learn it that at some point you stop thinking about it. (As I think more on it, I realize I have a lot of folklore rattling around in my head about the relationship between fruit and seed propagation where I suspect there’s actually a lot of variety in various ecologies about how fruit helps to spread seeds. Worth reading up on with some detail.)
I also sauteed some mushrooms and made up a little radish salad. I love the look of these little pioppino mushrooms but they tend to become little mushroom crisps and lose most of their shape and look when they’re sauteed alongside bigger mushrooms. I think if I were trying to focus on a more elegant service, I’d cook them separately, more gently.
Anyway, the final plate of food was pretty good, with grits, gravy, sliced pork and mushrooms. I’ll call it a win.
Sumptuous array. I shouldn’t read stuff like this in the late afternoon as I’m pondering what to make for dinner. I’m bound to put together way too much for a lone dinner.
I don't really know the biochemistry behind this, but one thing I've learned from following Dave Arnold's Cooking Issues is that ascorbic acid is a much better anti-oxidant for apples than citric acid is. I make an ascorbic acid solution to dunk apple sections in when my kids want to take apple slice for lunch.