A Bad Day, Fixed by Curry, Or: "I'm Warning You, There's Tofu in This!"

So I've been on a bit of a losing streak. My car needed new terminal clamps, and it died in the middle of traffic yesterday; I had to have my seven-year-old sit in the driver's seat and turn the key in the ignition while I held the battery cable in place so we could start it and drive it to the nearest auto parts store, where I had to replace the clamps in the parking lot. This morning I was at a big-box store and accidentally left one of my bags at the checkout, not realizing my mistake until I was all the way home, causing an aggravating re-schlep. Let me not even describe the demoralizing shopping experience prompted by my fear that none of my kicky cotton sundresses will be sufficiently Krystle Carrington-esque for the fancy dinners on the cruise I'll soon be departing for. I fear the biddies on the ship will receive my down-home attire like Nellie Oleson responded to the Ingalls girls' outgrown calico dresses and bare feet in "On The Banks of Plum Creek:" - "Country girls!" [sniff!]

This curry recipe RAWKS. Easy, convenient, delicious, vegetarian. The kids both liked it, despite the fact that Ike was determined not to eat the tofu. The red curry paste I worried would be magma-hot based on its lava-red appearance was actually mild, flavorful and sweet(ish). It would not be possible to improve on this by the addition of bacon. I felt good about myself while cooking it and good about myself after eating it. You could even serve it to freaks who don't think they like spicy or "foreign" food. Ahhh. Curry happiness.

And yes, Oscar is wearing pants to the dinner table. They are out of frame.

Tofu and Sweet Potato Curry: Before

I take a demented pleasure in creating these little pre-dinner tableaux. Assembling ingredients, especially for a colorful dish like this one, makes me understand the appeal of raw-foodism a bit more. There's also an orderly appeal in doing a super-thorough mise en place, which is a cooking lesson it took me FAR too long to learn: that "two cups chopped onion" means that you, the cook, need to actually chop two cups of onion before you even begin step one of the recipe in order to avoid manic and dangerous mid-recipe chopping and potential disruption of the entire enterprise. My cooking is now discretely divided into chopping mode and cooking mode, and when it comes to a Thai dish like this one, the former is orders of magnitude lengthier than the latter, the prime example being pad thai, which takes about an hour to chop and prep and five minutes to cook. Ike has already informed me that he is "allergic" to two of the ingredients in this dish - red peppers and tofu - so I'm pessimistic about its success and considering changing the name of this blog to "Cooking Despite Two Dudes." My kitchen looks much gloomier in this picture than it actually is, but for those of you who dislike the heartless objectification of food you can clearly see my knife, cutting board and cookbook in the background of this slightly ominous still life.

What Do You Do With a Head of Red Cabbage?

If it were left entirely up to me, my family's diet would be far less healthy. Lots of butter, lots of coconut milk, unlimited quantities of cheese - if I were a single girl, my cuisine might have ultimately devolved into me, sitting on the couch in my sweats with a whole stick of butter in my hand and chomping on it like a peeled banana. Caleb is a healthful influence, but sometimes he'll bring a so-called Superfood into the house without any overall design as to how it's going to fit into our shambles of a family meal plan. Recently, an entire head of red cabbage appeared in our fridge, and there it has sat, waiting for me to transmogrify it into a Dish. Hence the salad you see in its pre-assembled components: vinaigrette and Braeburn apples, shredded red cabbage with some very un-appetizing-looking dried cherries, and the spiced candied pecans I MADE MYSELF while buzzing from a big Starbucks latte, which is the unbilled ingredient in nearly every meal I make. The pecans were absurdly easy to make and smelled up the kitchen in a good way - brown sugar, cayenne pepper and Worcestershire sauce which sadly makes this a not-strictly-vegetarian recipe. The salad is meant to contain equal parts red and Napa cabbage but the overall raison d'etre here is to lay waste to an entire head of the red stuff, so the Napa has been benched. The kids will hate this recipe, I have little doubt, but it will probably add a good week or so to the lives of those of us who eat it.

Lamb Rogan Josh: After

While the adults in the house enjoyed the lamb rogan josh, the under-ten set gives it a mixed review. This is the way Oscar and Ike evaluate everything - with the "Gladiator"-style thumbs-up, -down, or the milquetoast non-review, thumbs-sideways. Here, Oscar is trying not to piss me off by giving my Indian curry a fully negative review, but the fact that he barely ate two bites of it is what I consider a thumbs way down. Ike thought that "the meat warms [his] throat up," and later augmented his review to "too spicy." You can see that I served it over basmati rice and garnished the whole shebang with cilantro. This kind of dish tends to be better the second day. More interesting posts will surely follow, not all limited to the subject of food. In unrelated news, I sang "Okie From Muskogee" to my co-workers today and discovered that despite the fact that I spent hour upon hour painting my toenails with Malia Gagliano in high school listening to the "Platoon" soundtrack on cassette on her back deck, I could not remember that many of the lyrics. How perplexing is memory.

Lamb Rogan Josh: Before

Long time no post. I have just gotten my hands on my very own digital camera, so as soon as I grok how to use it there will be pictures galore and more posts. Tonight I'm making lamb rogan josh. What's not to like about Indian food? Seriously. Naan is delicious. Tikka masala is delicious. A tandoori is capable of alchemically transmogrifying even the most uninspiring raw materials into pure red-tinted deliciousness. I was originally planning on making this dish on Christmas day. I had all of my ingredients assembled ahead of time, or so I thought. On the day, I realized that I had NO fresh ginger (an ingredient I usually have around), thus triggering an hours-long trek all over Madison looking for a grocery store that was both open and stocked with fresh ginger. No such thing. So we all ended up going to Taste of India for dinner. My understanding that Chinese restaurants were the customary destination for a Christmas meal out was incorrect; Indian restaurants, at least in Madison, are the go-to destination. The rogan josh dish was pushed up to tonight and is currently simmering away on the stove. I could eat lamb for every meal. Not only is it delicious, but there is something delightfully perverse in consuming an animal that is so cute and fuzzy while it is living and doesn't have a euphemistic name once it's transformed into meat, like "veal" or "squab". If I can figure out this newfangled photo-graph machine, I will post a picture of the finished product and you can all wish you were in my cozy turmeric-scented kitchen this evening, listening to me whinge endlessly about rude library patrons.

Candlelight Makes It Special

My husband has been out of town for several days, and it always surprises me how quickly the kids and I descend into "Lord of the Flies" territory unless we are vigilant in keeping up appearances. It's hard to get motivated to cook a decent meal for one full appetite (mine) and two very small and occasionally nonexistent ones (the boys). Yet we are told that sitting down for a family dinner together is the cornerstone of functional nuclear blah blah blah, so I've been trying to maintain some semblance of an evening meal even though the food itself is uninspiring. Hot dogs, mac and cheese from a box, etc. Since I'm somewhat deficient in the strong-armed discipline department (that's dad's bailiwick) I've had to be creative in getting them all to assume their dinnertime positions. That's where the candles enter the picture. The kids are willing to sit, eat and chat about the day much more willingly when the lighting is moody and romantic. Messed up, no? There is an inverse relationship between the formality of the setting and the hauteur of the meal. This evening's repast will most likely be Taco Bell by candlelight. Ole!

The Uncanny Valley

I've heard this term - the Uncanny Valley - most commonly used to refer to the CGI humans you see in movies that are intended to, but fail to, resemble real people. That is to say, the creators have tried to create a close facsimile of a human but fallen just short enough to make you feel creepy all over. As opposed to cartoonish humans that are clearly not intended to be realistic (like the infantilized ones I saw with my kids in WALL*E this summer). Obviously, this is an intensely useful term with lots of other applications. I had cause to think of this recently when describing to my mother a movie I saw in the early '90s called "Stanno Tutti Bene" by Giuseppe Tornatore, the filmmaker who did "Cinema Paradiso." The Uncanny Valley experience was engendered by the appearance of the aging Marcello Mastroianni in character, pictured above in his characteristic suit and glasses. The uncanny part is that, to me at least, this character looked remarkably like what I imagined my father, who died twenty years ago, would look like if he had lived longer than forty-seven years. My dad wore exactly this style of spectacles and had the same brushy mustache, and dressed in a suit and tie for his very square job at IBM. It was very odd to watch an entire feature film in which this character went through his paces speaking Italian and engaging in heartwarming and -breaking interactions with his adult children. I don't know if this effect would hold up if I watched the movie today but at the time it was fairly startling. I'm not going to watch this movie again, probably because re-watching it might cause the comparison to break down. If I preserve that 1992-ish experience, it's almost like uncanny Mastroianni-dad still exists on an alternative cinematic plane, preserved on a digital recording in a foreign language.