Au Revoir, Les Enfants

We are on vacation without the kids. Yesterday, my mother met us at the airport in Chicago and we handed Oscar and Ike over to her for what will undoubtedly be a week of such extreme fun for the dudes that they may never want to return to Wisconsin. Right now, Caleb and I are at a HoJos in San Juan, Puerto Rico, enjoying the free wireless and the balmy breeze blowing in the window of our seventh-floor room. We've been travelling all day, beginning at six o'clock this morning when Caleb's sister Naomi drove us to O'Hare in an extremely ominous snowstorm. After a de-icing procedure that involved an extremely macabre-looking red fluid being sprayed onto the airplane windows, our flight took of on time. And we were behind Law & Order star Dennis Farina in the security line! His carry-on luggage looked very expensive and I felt a bit embarrassed when the plastic tub containing my Radio-Shack-model laptop collided with his briefcase, which looked as if it were made from the tanned hide of a unicorn.

From a gustatory standpoint, the trip has been a disaster. After an encouraging start (deluxe cocktails at The Violet Hour with Naomi and a "small plates" dinner), I have had nothing but cheeseburgers all day, as well as one extremely doughy and bland in-flight bagel sandwich. The strip our hotel is on contains no real dining options other than a full complement of American fast food. My dream of dining in Puerto Rico involved a little shack on the beach where a pig was being roasted in some authentic Boricuan style on a spit, and adventurous gringos are welcomed with raised glasses of mojitos and fed delicious pork dishes garnished with sofrito. No dice. However, the ocean is clearly visible from our hotel-room window, our view bisected neatly by the tower of the fancier and more-expensive hotel across the steet. Nonetheless - can't complain.

Mom, Do I Get My Dessert Now?

Still getting the hang of posting photos - these appear in reverse chronological order. We just got back from a rare meal out, courtesy of my in-laws at Madison's Nepalese institution, Himal Chuli. The place has been operating for as long as I've lived here, which is going on twenty-plus years, and it has a sort of careworn authenticity about it. I've historically ordered the same thing every time I go there, operating on the "if it ain't broke" principle, because what I order - momochas - are the thing most people kvell about when they talk about Himal Chuli. The sweet waitress very earnestly tried to take six-year-old Ike's order first, and he credibly and seriously began ordering for himself a dish from the menu he had selected - i.e., not the kid-friendly dish Caleb and I had pre-chosen for his meal. He had ordered chicken sikar, which I then decided to have so that we could share it, and it's pictured above in its before and after states. This dish was so very tasty - it was listed as "popular chicken sikar" on the menu, and I can see why. Nothing novel, just general curry-like tastiness with lots of flavor but no real heat, the perfect thing to eat on a cold day like today.

Right now, Madison is covered in a thick, glossy sheet of ice and the cold has that peculiar quality that can only be described as "bitter." We wouldn't have left the house at all if not for the in-laws' visit. The experience was something like a sauna - plunging ourselves into the freezing outdoors to go consume Himal Chuli's food, which is the alimentary equivalent of antifreeze: steaming bowls of dal, steaming cups of tea, steaming everything. Except the lassis, which the boys are pictured draining in the above photo. In the kid-adventuring department, the meal was a resounding success. Ike polished off his half of the sikar and Oscar demolished two samosas, which he had never tried before. The dudes did us proud, although Osk may be suffering from culinary whiplash after consuming two pepperoni-pizza Hot Pockets for lunch before dining on authentic vegetarian Nepali cuisine for dinner.

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.