Dinner in the Yellow House

Cook's Repose

When my son (M'hijo) was about four months old I pasted the word "LAUGH" onto my kitchen wall, just to the left of the stove.  You can see the first four letters of it here.  Just ignore the monkey with her ridiculously-sized snickerdoodle in front. 

M'hijo was having a daily cranky period just at about exactly the time when whatever I was making for supper was at the crucial moment.*  I needed that word there to keep me sane when I had three pots going on the stovetop, one or sometimes two six-year-olds demanding that I find gluesticks and scissors, the phone ringing, the cat underfoot because she hasn't been fed in 36 hours, and above all, M'hijo crying to be picked up. 

Other mothers have commented that "LAUGH" isn't quite the right word for this situation.  They thought "HOWL" would be more appropriate.  But LAUGH works for me.  It helps me keep my cool.

But there is one day a week when I get the luxury of cooking in an empty kitchen.  The cat may be there, but no humans are.  This is Sundays at four, when Tobias takes the kids to visit his grandmother and I make our Sunday dinner.  Ah sweet Sunday, when I can open and close the oven as much as I want, without worrying that anyone is going to try to get into it.  Wonderful Sunday, when the floor of the kitchen isn't covered with the entire contents of the tupperware cupboard.  Beautiful Sunday, when I can focus all my attention on peeling potatoes, and if I have any attention leftover, I can always listen to Wiretap. 

Sometimes, however, a cook needs to take a moment away from the stove altogether.  Yesterday, when Tobias took the children away, the first thing I did was pop the chicken in the oven, and the second thing I did was make a cup of coffee and slice a piece of chocolate bundt cake.  And the third thing I did was crack open my brand-new copy of Chocolate and Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen for the very first time. 

Clotilde writes

"I find that a book -- the object itself, the weight in your hands, the presence on your bedside table -- has a personality and charm that a Web site  can never hope to achieve.  It's hard to take a Web site in the kitchen with you, or curl up with it on the couch, a mug of tea by your side and the cat on your lap"

Too true, and her new book is exactly the right kind for all of these activities.  Small, colourful, full of amazing photos and lovely anecdotes, I could get a lot of enjoyment out of this cookbook even if I never made any of the recipes. 

But of course that's not going to happen.  I plan to start experimenting with the recipes in C & Z this weekend.

So I guess I squandered my cooking alone time a bit this week, sitting at my dining room table sipping coffee and imagining myself childfree, living in Montmartre.  And let me tell you I paid for it, when M'hijo returned, demanding that I play trucks with him just as I was beginning to chop the carrots.  So maybe next Sunday I'll chop and prep everything first, then take my cook's repose. 

*In retrospect, I wish I'd taken a cooking holiday during his infancy.  I really felt like it was important to keep the nightly family dinners going in the same way as usual, and not resort to takeout more than strictly necessary, but now I see that was a mistake.

Best Butter Chicken Ever

Lest you think we in the Yellow House are all about growing our own food and making things from scratch, I will admit to using one particular convenience food quite a lot: butter chicken flavouring mixes.  For years, we've been searching for a way to make butter chicken easily at home that approximates the taste of our favourite butter chickens: Da Tandoor (Tobias' favourite) and Trimurti (my favourite). 

The findings:

• the worst way to make butter chicken is to simply add a sauce from a jar.  Patak's = yuck.  I've tried four types of jarred pastes/sauces and none were good. 
• having to add a lot of ingredients (butter, milk, tomatoes, tomato sauce) yourself seems like it would result in a better butter chicken, but this isn't necessarily the case.  A long-reigning winner was a little metallic packet that I found at the wonderful Seven Valleys (2506 Douglas Street) that required only the addition of milk.  Unfortunately I can't remember the brand name of this mix, and the Seven Valleys owner told me she had trouble restocking it after she ran out. 
• there does seem to be a correlation between the time taken to prepare the dish and the flavour.  The longer the cooking time, usually, the better the result.

Our unscientific survey has now ended with the discovery of Daksha's Gourmet Spices Butter Chicken mix.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mix leaves the cook with the most work to do of any of those we've tried, and takes a while to make (about an hour).  Still, it's much quicker than the recipe given to me by my daughter's best friend's former nanny, which started "Take a chicken, and the following spices...." and continued, "let it marinate for 24 hours at the least, 72 hours ideally" and finished "let it simmer for about half an hour" with some oven time somewhere in between. 

Daksha's spices are available by mail order from SpicesGourmet.com and also at Slater's First Class Meats (2577 Cadboro Bay Road), which is where I got mine.  I will now start experimenting with every Daksha's product I can find.  I love the fact that my favourite butter chicken mix comes from teeny little Williams Lake, BC! 

For the record, I have made butter chicken from scratch, once, when I was a young, silly bride.  The results were ho-hum.  If I remember correctly, I didn't handle the spices well.  I think I may have even burned them but put them in anyway.  If I do try again, I'll probably use one of the three recipes posted in MuslimVillage. 

Crumbs

• I just listened to The Restaurant Guys podcast featuring Marcus Samuelsson and I think he may be the best guest they've ever had.  He was the youngest chef to receive three stars from the New York Times (he was 25ish when this happened) and just sounds like a really smart and amazing guy.  I have just put his book on hold at the library and I am going to try to learn to cook some delicious African food before my sister returns from Tanzania at Christmas.  She made me a Tanzanian dinner once and despite my skepticism and annoyance at her insistence that I not use any utensils, I enjoyed it a lot.  I can't remember exactly what it was, but I do remember that it was really good. 
• I have been meaning to post an entry about my attempts to create the perfect omelette, but Pim beat me to it.  Now I really want to try her version of the perfect omelette.  My current one is a plain one with just chopped chives, made in the style of Alton Brown.  But one thing he never talks about in his Omelet episode, and that Pim quite rightly makes a big deal of, is the importance of fresh eggs.  The best omelette I ever had was in Seattle at our friend Mike's house and was made with two fresh eggs, a teeny bit of gruyere and some sauteed freshly-picked squash (not sure of the name, but looked like white zucchini). He wasn't terribly fussy about his method, but his ingredients were sublime, and the results were too.