Battle curry

It’s amazing what some drunken boasting can lead to. However, never before has it led to a battle of culinary skill. I must have been rather toasted at Ryan’s party if I somehow thought it was reasonable for Prasad and me to go head-to-head in an Indian curry challenge. What was I thinking? He’s Indian and actually from India. Sure, I’m pretty handy in the kitchen but I’m no sub-continent native. I don’t have spices running through my veins. I don’t eat raw green chilies as a snack. And, most importantly, I don’t have an Indian mother who, for sure, knows how to make awesome curry. I would get clobbered at a curry off. But, I was drunk, I said I could cook, and there was no way I was going to back down from a curry off.

Prasad and I chose a day. We chose a place. We invited friends to be the judges. All we needed were the chicken curries.

I started mine early in the afternoon for a seven o’clock showdown. It’s a pretty basic chicken curry. Toast some spices (green cardamom, black peppercorns, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, cloves, dried red chilies) in some oil. Then sauté some garlic, onions, and ginger until brown. Toss in some green chilies and some cayenne and tumeric. Add some chopped tomatoes with a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste. Then, blend the mixture. Put the chopped chicken sprinkled with tumeric, cayenne, and salt in the hot pot. Add some plain yogurt. Stir in the blended tomato mix along with some water or stock. Simmer until it’s done. Then finish with some lemon and chopped cilantro. It’s not too tough, and I was ready well in advance.

Prasad showed up with his pot of curry with the lid duct-taped secure. As he went to park his car, Scott removed the duct tape and I had a quick peek. His was a darker color than mine and looked foreboding. I took a quick taste too. The first thing that hit me was the intensity of the spiciness. My eyes widened and my nostrils flared. I make a spicy curry and I can handle heat, but his curry was about to knock me down flat. I was nervous.

Prasad came back and we made several pots of basmati rice. We had beers as Scott stirred our curries over low heat. We chatted about hot sauce and chilies. We discussed cooking methods and ingredients. We waited for rice to cook and guests to arrive.

When the guest judges arrived, all 18 of them it turned out, we ladled up the curry. Mine was on one side of the plate, Prasad’s was on the other, and in between was a barrier of basmati. The visible difference between the curries was the color. One was dark with tinges of brown and green, whereas the other was more of an orangey-hued brown. We referred to them as “light” and “dark.”

Our judges dug in, mmm-ing at the curries while wiping sweat from their brow and reaching for more beer, water, or, in some cases, milk. They asked whose curry belonged to whom, but we kept tight lips. They went back for more rice. They went back for more curry. They went back and forth in their contemplation of whose curry they liked better. And, they were adamant to put the curries to a vote.

As Scott spearheaded the tallying of curry favorites, Prasad and I were relegated to the confines of the kitchen, amused and surprised at the intensity at which our friends were taking the judgment of curry. After all the drunken boasting of how awesome my curry is, I didn’t care that much anymore. We had friends over for food and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Or, maybe I didn’t care because I was anxious that my curry wouldn’t be the winning one. Maybe that was Prasad’s reason for not caring so much for the vote either. Was he nervous about losing a curry off to a Chinese girl?

Scott returned to the kitchen with the results and it turned out to be a dead tie. Eight votes for Prasad’s and eight votes for mine. Four people refrained from the vote, only because they knew who made what. There couldn’t have been a more unbelievable outcome and when the results were announced, no one believed it.

In the end though, I think our friends were the winners. They had a free dinner on a Sunday evening, and what’s not to like about a free dinner? But, we do have Curry Off 2007 in the works. It’ll be lamb.

Curry off

Somehow, I was challenged by (or I challenged--I can't remember exactly since I was probably a little drunk when it happened) Prasad, Ryan's friend, to a curry off. We'd each make our version of Indian chicken curry and see whose is the finer fare.

Curry Off will take place at seven o'clock next Sunday at my house. We need judges, so if you want to exercise your taste buds in a battle of curries, let me know.

Hipster flavor

I had forgotten how many hipster 24 year-olds there are in the Mission. And, I don't really think of myself as one, until Scott, or someone else, makes some remark.

Tonight Scott, his friend Jose, and I walked over to El Buen Sabor on Valencia and 18th for some food. On our walk there from our house, we encountered several groups of twenty-somethings. The first group (two boys and two girls, all of whom were wearing either tight jeans, hooded sweater/sweatshirt, and blazer or some combination of those items) were talking about how cool "Stairway to Heaven" is when sung backwards in Norwegian. The second group (a foursome of dingy-looking and kinda drugged-out girls) were walking by the community thrift store on Valencia when one remarked, "This is the best thrift store ever." The third group of three boys and two girls was eating at El Buen Sabor as well, was dressed in regulation hipster uniform, and looked as if, as Scott described it, they were on a group Mormon date.

As I sat there eating my super taco (it really was super, piled high with grilled steak, black beans, cheese, rice, and lettuce) and drinking my Modelo, I made a mental note to shop for non-blazer jackets, to not wear my Chuck Taylors quite as often, to not get my hair cut asymmetrically, and to be proud of the fact that few people guess that I'm as young as I really am.

Baking dish dinner

A couple of years ago, Manoella and I had dinners together regularly Tuesday nights. We’d cook at her house and watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This was when we were both AmeriCorps VISTAs, earning a poverty-level living stipend, which amounted to approximately $800 a month, a pittance really and an almost impossible income to live off of in San Francisco. I don’t know how we managed and I don’t know what happened to those Tuesday dinners. But, making up for lost time and lost dinners, I invited Manoella and her boyfriend over for a Friday night meal of turkey lasagna and peach cobbler.

The last time I had Manoella over for dinner, I had also made a lasagna. That time I didn’t realize how much more salt the parmesan cheese would add to dish and had over-seasoned. This time, I would learn my lesson and not be so heavy-handed with the dousing of sodium. I started the lasagna by making a pretty basic tomato sauce. Sautee some onions and garlic. Toss in the turkey (Manoella was still not eating four-legged animals) and cook until brown. Then add some diced tomatoes, simmer, and season with whatever you find in the cupboard. I grated up some mozzarella and some parmesan and took out the ricotta. I was ready to layer. Noodles, sauce, cheese, noodles, sauce, cheese. Pretty easy stuff.

Next came the peach cobbler. I hadn’t initially intended on making dessert but we were given part of the afternoon off from work, which gave me time to bake a cobbler, something I hadn’t done in a few years and which I missed. It’s still prime pitted fruit season and I had some gorgeously succulent peaches earlier in the week, so I decided peach would be the way to go. I peeled and sliced my peaches, tossed them with some cornstarch, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon, put them into a baking dish and into the over for fifteen minutes for them to release some of their juices. In the meantime, I set about making a butter cookie topping with a heart attack inducing amount of butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, egg, baking powder, and salt. This mixture got spooned all over the top of the peaches and then into the oven some more.

When Manoella and Connan arrived, the lasagna just needed to brown its top and the cobbler was cooling. Timing couldn’t have worked out better. I made a Caesar salad and used the croutons I had made earlier in the week, and we sat down to dinner. The lasagna wasn’t too salty this time and neither was it too cheesy (as the time Scott and I made one not too many weeks ago). The noodles were just the right amount of tenderness and the sauce was richly flavored. The cobbler, which I could have eaten the whole dish of, was delicious. The peaches were sweet but not sugary so. And the butter cookie topping, which had spread across the entire pan, was crisp, sweet, and chock full of buttery goodness. I was glad to have Manoella over for dinner again.