Falling and Laughing

Hello tumblr chums, it’s Sunday Cookery time again. I know you’ve been in suspense since last week’s vindaloo teaser, so let me just cut to the chase and say that tonight’s meal is maybe my new favorite thing I’ve ever made at home, and my eyes are still watering in the best way. But first:

A DIGRESSION ON MEAT AND WHY I’M COOKING MORE AT HOME: I had read enough of the Schlosser/Pollan oeuvre to know that I really shouldn’t be eating your standard big-box grocery-store-type meat, but it took seeing Food Inc. this fall to decide that I’ll only eat meat when (1) I know something about where it came from and (2) I have some certainty that the animals who became my meat didn’t have some hellish industrial agriculture experience. This is all well and good in practice, but I quickly realized that a lot of my favorite dishes from my regular Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, etc. holes-in-the-wall were now problematic. WOULD I HAVE TO GIVE UP VINDALOO? HOW DEPRESSING IS THE IDEA OF TOFU VINDALOO? Thus began my ongoing project to recreate some of my favorite Indian and SE Asian dishes at home, where I know what the components are.

(A FURTHER DIGRESSION: I feel v. bougie expressing these sentiments, and realize how lucky I am to have the luxury of worrying about such things. But hey, I don’t cook with meat that often and when I do, it’s nice not to have to handle it like it is tortured poison.)

ANYWAY: the vindaloo. I followed this basic recipe, with the following changes:

• Didn’t bother with the tamarind pulp, mustard oil, or mustard seed. Instead pumped up the other spices all around, and added olive oil and chicken broth to the marinade
• I didn’t want to make a trip to the always crazymaking Devon Ave just to pick up ghee, so I used niter kebbeh that I had on hand instead. It’s basically the same thing, except Ethiopian and spiced.
• I added potatoes, because I am used to vindaloo having potatoes, even if it is inauthentic.
• I added about a half-can of diced tomatoes, out of an errant assumption that vindaloo needed some tomatoes for proper redness. This was a misstep—while eating I realized the tomato flavors hadn’t been present in any vindaloo I’d ever had before.
• Used chicken stock instead of water.
• And yes: it’s winter in Chicago. Bring on the motherfucking three-different-kinds-of-starch meals (rice? check nan? check potatoes? check). And four if you count Red Stripe (which you should).

Stay tuned for next week’s installment: Oyako Don for Fakers, or, How I Plan to Put on 10 LBS in Carb Weight this Winter Pt II

Bonus picture:

The root of all evil: 4 serranos and a whole head of garlic marinate evilly in white wine vinegar. This is where vindaloo starts. I should have known I was in trouble when I had a coughing fit after catching an errant whiff of the marinade. WHILE WASHING OUT THE BOWL WHICH BY THAT POINT CONTAINED ONLY TRACE ELEMENTS OF THE MARINADE.