Go, Sarah, Go!

Wednesday, January 28th

I came home today to find Sarah P and Benoit in the kitchen waiting for a head cook. At about 4:10, Benoit checked the sign up sheet and discovered that no one had taken the shift. So the two assistant cooks instantly rose to the task in front of them, rummaging around the kitchen, looking for protein sources and unclaimed veggies, but seemed like everything they picked out was reserved for my meal tomorrow.

It's hard enough cooking for the house when you're down a set of hands, but they were hit by surprise and without a plan (no defrosted meat! no soaking beans!), and additionally had my greedy kitchen whining to deal with (hands off those peppers!), so I stuck around for a little while to help them plan. Specifically, I started some Massaman curry, in the hopes that a rich coconut milk based Thai curry would stretch out the small bag of chicken that Benoit found, and make the whole meal seem more substantial. Sarah took on the head chef role and made some awesome lentils for the vegetarians, and quinoa, and stir fried some bok choy. The total quantity of food was a little low (you can only chop so much with 2/3 of a team), but overall I was quite impressed with her meal. Very well done, for such a last minute affair, and quite substantial as well.

The Massaman curry was a liberally modified recipe from somewhere on the internet. Equal parts coconut milk and veggie broth (two big cans each), lots of cumin and coriander, quite a bit of cinnamon and cardamom, a little nutmeg and cloves, and a tiny bit of tumeric for color. Soy sauce. Brown sugar. Most of the work went into making an impromptu curry paste: roughly chopped red onions, peeled and coarsely chopped ginger, peeled whole garlic, a few chopped chilies, and 3 quartered limes sauteed until the onions looked brownish, then thrown in the food processor and turned to mush. Perhaps not the most nuanced approach, but the whole limes were a solid co-opy replacement for both lemongrass and lime leaves.

I left Sarah with a big pot of curry and nothing in it. She and Benoit split the curry into two pots, chopped up a million sweet potatoes and a bunch of onions and threw them into both, then processed and fried a bag of chicken thighs and added them to one of the pots. They had roasted peanuts and dried coconut on the side, as well as a bottle of fish sauce. (The fish sauce really should have gone into the curry, at least the chicken one, but fish sauce is very controversial, so to the side it went). Green onions and cilantro would have been nice, but again: there's only so much you can do with two cooks. I don't even know if we had cilantro.

The lentils were tamarind lentils from the Veganomicon. I suggested them because I thought that the tamarind would go well with the curry. It's not clear if the pairing really worked, but the lentils themselves were super delicious. For all the complaints I hear about too many lentils, these didn't even last through dinner. Maybe it's just my lentils people don't like. Sarah's were a huge success.

Along with the lentils and curry, they made quinoa and bok choy. Either this quinoa was somehow different than our usual quinoa, or Sarah is a better quinoa washer than I am, but it seemed extra nutty and totally lacking in the usual quinoa hint o' bitterness. That did go extremely well with the curry. If I ever make Thai curry again for the house, I plan to forgo the usual brown rice. and make some quinoa. It was perfect.

And hopefully, I'll have three cooks, so that there will be time to chop more bok choy, because one wok full is definitely not enough!