Me & JP

I went a few weeks back to see Jacques Pépin speak and sign his new book, More Fast Food My Way, at the the Astor Center.  It was really great.  He had so many memorable things to say:

• The art of cooking is the art of adjustment, and sometimes, the art of recovery. My mom's the expert here.  I've seen her recover so many dishes that I would've given up on.  People got fed, they enjoyed it, and they were never the wiser.
• Never apologize and never explain. A motto he passed on from Julia Child.  At most tables where you're setting down food, you know the most about how the dish should be. This goes double if it's a dish of your own creation. If you keep your self-criticisms to yourself, everyone has a better meal.  If there's a fellow chef at table and you tell an out-and-out lie, a simple wink will suffice to keep them quiet.  They'll expect the same discretion from you when they screw something up, though.  (Again, my mom comes to mind... though she has never told a white lie to make her guests more comfortable, right, Mom? [wink])

I can't overstate how much of an influence this man has been on the way I cook.  I think I'm not alone in saying that he elucidated a way of cooking at home that I had always though of, but hadn't trusted myself enough to do.  He's a great force against pretentiousness in the food world and a national treasure.

 

The Fish Sauce Postulate

The Fish Sauce Postulate:

If a cook is adventurous, the contents of his fridge and pantry will always be crowded with arcane, unused ingredients unless he has,

a.) a good recipe that uses each ingredient, and

b.) a means for reminding himself to cook that recipe regularly.

Call it, "a use for everything and everything in use."

I've recently embarked upon a quest to have a clear use for everything I have in my kitchen.  So far, it's yielding good results.  I try a lot of different recipes and am always experimenting, so there's a constant influx of interesting ingredients.  The fresh ones that don't get used get chucked pretty quickly, but the long-lived ingredients just end up taking up space.  For instance, I picked up some tamarind paste at Dual Quality Products to try out this recipe.  The results where not awesome, but I am totally down with cooking eggplant in the microwave and have done so to good effect since, just not south Indian eggplant.  But I still have that tamarind paste in the fridge.  And unless I get a recipe that uses tamarind paste, it's going to be there until it goes off (a year from now!) and gets thrown out.

So the pantry list is now more of a whole-house food inventory.  I've added all of these recipes to Bubbalup, my organizational tool (forthcoming soon, I promise), and it's working just brilliantly.  I keep black sesame seeds on hand, and every now and then zakkokumai cha zuke will bubble up on my list, ensuring that the sesame seeds have a chance of some day not being in my pantry.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.  Of course, I may be totally insane.

Chettinad Chicken/Durban Curry Hybrid

I've developed a one-pot Chettinad Chicken recipe that's informed by a more Western style of cooking.

My starting points were here and here.

A lot of Indian recipes involve toasting spices and/or frying onions in oil or ghee at the end.  This gets stirred into the stewed portion of the dish and served immediately.  It's very similar to the Latin cooking method of soffrito, in which a mixture of onions, peppers, garlic and spices gets fried in oil at the end of a cooking process and added into, for instance, boiled black beans.  

There are two problems with this for how I cook:

1.) It creates another dirty pan.

2.) I burn things way too easily when I do this.  

Toasting spices in hot oil and frying onions are fairly delicate operations and putting them at the end of the cooking process, when I'm concerned about getting to the table on time, boiling rice, etc, is just not feasible for me.  I need a bit more of a French-style layering approach, where the more labor-intensive portion is at the beginning, and I think I can do this without losing too much.  

Or maybe I just haven't had it explained to me why frying spices at the end is better than doing it at the beginning and having the flavors fully incorporated into the final dish.  We cook with leftovers in mind, and curry is almost always better the next day anyway, so I don't see a great deal of potential hazard in re-ordering the traditional recipes a bit.

One-pot Chettinad Chicken (or Tofu)

2 lbs fresh tomatoes

1 tsp cumin seed

1 tsp whole black peppercorns

1 tbsp coriander seed

1 tbsp poppy seed

1 tbsp fennel seed

2 green cardamom pods

3 cloves

1/2 a cinnamon stick (or 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon)

3 dried red chilis (available at Indian markets)

1 tsp salt

1 cup plain yogurt

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp minced ginger

Juice of 1 large lime

2 1/2 lbs chicken thighs, chopped into chunks OR packages firm tofu, chopped into chunks

3 tbsp vegetable oil or ghee

1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced thinly

2 sprigs fresh curry leaves (available at many Indian markets)

6 pods dried red chilis 

Fresh cilantro

Core tomatoes and score the bottom of each with an X.  Put in a large bowl and cover with boiling water for one minute.  Run cold water into the bowl until tomatoes are cool enough to handle.  Strip off skins, half tomatoes across the equator, and squeeze out seeds.  Chop tomatoes coarsely and set aside.

In a dry skillet combine the cumin, coriander, peppercorns, poppy seed, fennel seed, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon. Toast over medium heat until fragrant. The cumin seeds will darken first.  When they do so, take off heat and allow to cool.  Grind to a fine powder with a clean, spice-dedicated coffee grinder.

Combine spice mix in a non-reactive bowl with Aleppo pepper, yogurt, garlic, ginger, salt, lime juice, and chicken.  Marinate in the refrigerator for at least two hours, covered.

Heat vegetable oil or ghee in a heavy, non-reactive pot off-heat.  Strip curry leaves into the oil, stir. Be careful, it will sputter.  When the sputtering subsides, add 6 pods dried red chilis, stir until they darken, about 30 seconds.  Then add onions.  Cook until translucent.

Add yogurt-spice-chicken/tofu mixture and tomatoes.  Bring to boil and simmer uncovered 30 minutes to reduce sauce.  If liquid is still thin, you can thicken with a corn starch slurry (2 parts cold water, 1 part corn starch) or by sprinkling on and stirring in Wondra flour.

Serve over basmati rice, garnished with fresh cilantro.  It's spicy, so you can try cooling it down with yogurt.  (We added Mrs. Ball's chutney from South Africa, which went very well.)

Serves 6-8.