Posts Tagged ‘curry’

Lunch Club: Mango Red Curry with Tofu and Squash

Squash and mango curry (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The first rule of Lunch Club is: You don’t talk about Lunch Club. The second rule of Lunch Club is: Ignore the first rule and tell everyone you know about how great Lunch Club is because it’s really pretty awesome.

Lunch Club is what we’ve come to call lunch hour at the subtitling and translation company where I spend three days per week slinging snappy two-liners up on a screen. Everyone at the office is responsible for cooking lunch for the rest of the office once a week. It’s a tradition started long ago when there were only two of us, and has continued to this day, when sometimes, there are four or five of us busily typing away as we slurp up cup after cup of French press.

Tableaux with black futsu pumpkin (Eat Me. Drink Me.)
Red onions (Eat Me. Drink Me.)
Black Futsu pumpkin (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

We each have our gold standards – meals we like to keep on regular rotation and meals that continually get requests. One of my favorites is a Syrian fattoush – a softly warm salad of roasted eggplant, parsley, pomegranate, garlic, and cherry tomatoes served with buttery toasted pita chips. But when winter hits, Shaun puts in his request for hearty bowls of gumbo with chicken, shrimp, and okra I have to scrounge out of the deep-freeze bin at the Asian grocery store. Germany is not an okra-eating nation.

Won-ton soup is another of our favorites, a dish whose parts we often divvy up. Shaun makes the broth, clear and flavorful and dotted with mushrooms, julienned carrots, and baby bok choy. I make the won-tons stuffed with pork and scallions, and seasoned with dark soy sauce and brown sugar.

Quartered red onion (Eat Me. Drink Me.) Black futsu pumpkin (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

At one point during a summer in which we were obsessed with low-carb lunches, we even invented oat-crust pizza. We ground oats into a fine flour, mixed it with a little water and salt, spread it out on a baking tray, and baked it into a crisp crust, then topped it with tomato sauce, cheese, arugula, bacon, and peppers. » Continue reading this post...

Veggies in the Fridge, the Leftovers Edition: Thai Green Curry

Thai green curry (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

What to do the day after you’ve made Balinese Gado-Gado and have a refrigerator full of vegetables just begging to be eaten? Roll with the punches. Give them what they want.

And what do they want? Well, they desperately want to be made into a spicy, fragrant Thai Green curry.

Birds-eye chili (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Cilantro (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Preparing green curry paste (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I’m particularly fond of Thai food. It’s both comforting and fresh, spicy and sweet, and it makes use of some of my favorite ingredients: coconut, chili, cilantro, brown sugar, and lime to name just a few.

Measuring curry paste (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This green curry is plumped up with chicken and plenty of green vegetables like sugar snap peas, Napa cabbage, green bell pepper and sprouts. And carrots, which aren’t green, but wish they were.

Green peppers and carrots (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Chicken (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Green curry paste (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

It’s a lovely meal no matter whether you’re using up gado-gado leftovers or starting from scratch. » Continue reading this post...

The Nontraditional Easteralist or Curried Easter: Jamaican Strawberry & Pepper Roasted Fish and Curried Mashed Potatoes

Sigourney with the peppers (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The smell of frying fish and mangoes shocks the apartment as Sigourney drapes slips of catfish into a hot skillet. We’ve dragged ourselves out of bed for the third time today and this time, the effort seems to have paid off. Last night was a late night. An Easter party, whose connection to Easter seemed to veer toward the irreverent and bunny-themed took up the latter part of our night and the majority of the early morning. There was dancing, neon gin and tonic, and an Easter breakfast haloumi sandwich from the still-open or maybe just opened döner place by the train station.

This isn’t usually how I spend Easter. First of all, I’m usually still in bed at six. Secondly, I’m usually not roaming around the streets of Berlin with a pair of lopsided bunny ears haphazardly thrown together from a paper towel roll and some tape. Usually, I’m with my family. I make everyone dye Easter eggs, I cook an Easter feast, we unwrap baskets on Easter morning, and at Easter lunch we smash eggs together like our Bulgarian guests taught us once.

I guess this is what happens when you decide to uproot your life and move across the world and across the ocean. You make new traditions.

I let Sigourney cook. This is what I did instead… (Eat Me. Drink Me.) strawberry peppers (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

So our Easter feast this year is a roast Jamaican fish and mashed potatoes. There’s not an egg in sight. There’s no ham, no quiche, no rack of lamb. Just me and Sigourney and rap music and a roasting fish.

Jamaican strawberry and pepper roasted fish (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I love having visitors. Showing people around makes you more aware of the positive qualities of the place where you are. When you have to convince someone else they’re having a good time, you often end up having a good time yourself. Even though Berlin has been a bit moody this week (As Sigourney said, as it started to snow, then hail, then be sunny, “This weather is on its period.”), » Continue reading this post...

Christening: Chickpea Curry & Failproof Rice

The new kitchen (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Finally, a beginning.

Last night, I was talking with my roommate about the bedbugs. It’s still almost shameful to say, even though they are an epidemic in New York – apparently the whole country. The people I tell, I laugh and say, Oh, it’s fine, I’m just spending a fortune in laundry. But the bedbugs have brought out the worst in us. They have robbed us of our time and stolen our sanity. We bicker over little things and act selfishly because we can’t think otherwise. But mostly, we haven’t made our new apartment home. And somehow, it’s worse to expresses these fears than to suffer them in silence. But now you know.

We were in the kitchen, and I don’t remember why, but I wanted to know the secrets of making rice. My attempts always leave a thin burned layer of grains stuck to the bottom of the pot. I think of them as sacrificial grains.

Eulas started telling me his method for cooking rice – water to just cover the rice, cooked to boiling, heat turned low and covered while the steam works. Then Sarah – I’ve perfected my rice recipe. You need lots of time, at least 45 minutes. We debated rice cooking methods, discussed the merit of steam, water to rice ratios, pot types, rice types, and lids for half an hour. As the last few words were said, we began to separate; silence pushing us back to our rooms. We could make rice now, Sarah said. I’ll make beans, Eulas said, and with relief we drew together again in the kitchen.

Rice in the pot (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

We cooked and talked – about something, I don’t even remember – as the music of cars and neighborhood children clashed outside our window. The redolent smell of cumin and pepper and the kitchen’s warm lights. » Continue reading this post...