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livI decided to put in the effort to make a complicated multi-step curry for date night this week.
The main dishes were two of![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
bootstrapcook's recipes. I find Monroe's recipes really helpful, not because of low cost (I don't need to be that careful about my food budget), but because they're honest. Like, they never pretend you can put together some complex dish in "just" 10 minutes, because they don't assume you have underlings to do the actually time-consuming parts and the clean-up. They don't assume you have ready access to an exhaustive range of fancy ingredients, or specialist equipment. The recipes aren't always perfectly written; sometimes they get distracted and forget a critical step like actually cooking one of the components, but unlike a lot of food blogger recipes, I can usually easily work out what they mean even if the words don't actually make it to the screen.
Among my favourites of Monroe's curries are this vegan shashlik. In a pandemic I wasn't able to get tofu at short notice, so I substituted mushrooms, which cuts out some of the preparation steps. I still made the sauce separately in one pan, and left it to meld while I cooked the other components, and then pan-fried the mushrooms in a different pan and added them to the sauce. Normally I'm too lazy to do that, I just throw mushrooms in to whatever one-pot thing I'm making.
Another Monroe classic is their lentil and spinach daal. I make daal a lot, but this one has a major innovation of having yoghurt in it, and it's just that much richer than my standards. Not difficult, works fine with frozen spinach. I put proper effort into browning the onions with the spices, which is a very skippable step but everything is much tastier when I can be bothered.
We recently acquired a rice cooker, which I was a bit skeptical about because I didn't think it would enough easier than just making rice in a pan to justify the countertop space. But actually it comes into its own when you're making a meal more complex than just chilli and rice. You can start the rice whenever and it's warm and ready when the rest of the meal is ready to serve. I decided to try if I could make my mother's pilau in the rice cooker. Because I was feeling committed, I fried the spices first in a little oil (turmeric, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, cardamom), and then transferred the flavoured oil to the rice cooker. I added some basmati rice, 1.3 volumes of water, and a stock cube, turned it on and didn't have to pay any further attention. Came out really well.
Also we bought some ordinary supermarket naan bread and some poppadums and a couple of jars of random pickle we had in the cupboard. So the end result was a proper curry night. Definitely Anglo curry, I wasn't even trying for anything authentic. And it was more work than my usual weeknight meals, but not vastly more; the biggest difference was that I used basically all the pans and all the spoons in the kitchen!
I am certainly not going to cook a multi-part meal from scratch every night, but now my life has no commuting and many of my social things are restricted, I more often have time and enthusiasm for that level of cooking. But I'm slightly bored of most of my repertoire. Now that I'm pretty confident our supply chains are robust and I can reliably get hold of even non-standard ingredients, I would like to try some new things.
Would anyone like to suggest or swap recipes? What do you make on a weeknight that's easy but satisfying? What do you make when you have time and energy to cook, but short of actual formal entertaining (which isn't pandemic-appropriate anyway)?
The main dishes were two of
Among my favourites of Monroe's curries are this vegan shashlik. In a pandemic I wasn't able to get tofu at short notice, so I substituted mushrooms, which cuts out some of the preparation steps. I still made the sauce separately in one pan, and left it to meld while I cooked the other components, and then pan-fried the mushrooms in a different pan and added them to the sauce. Normally I'm too lazy to do that, I just throw mushrooms in to whatever one-pot thing I'm making.
Another Monroe classic is their lentil and spinach daal. I make daal a lot, but this one has a major innovation of having yoghurt in it, and it's just that much richer than my standards. Not difficult, works fine with frozen spinach. I put proper effort into browning the onions with the spices, which is a very skippable step but everything is much tastier when I can be bothered.
We recently acquired a rice cooker, which I was a bit skeptical about because I didn't think it would enough easier than just making rice in a pan to justify the countertop space. But actually it comes into its own when you're making a meal more complex than just chilli and rice. You can start the rice whenever and it's warm and ready when the rest of the meal is ready to serve. I decided to try if I could make my mother's pilau in the rice cooker. Because I was feeling committed, I fried the spices first in a little oil (turmeric, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, cardamom), and then transferred the flavoured oil to the rice cooker. I added some basmati rice, 1.3 volumes of water, and a stock cube, turned it on and didn't have to pay any further attention. Came out really well.
Also we bought some ordinary supermarket naan bread and some poppadums and a couple of jars of random pickle we had in the cupboard. So the end result was a proper curry night. Definitely Anglo curry, I wasn't even trying for anything authentic. And it was more work than my usual weeknight meals, but not vastly more; the biggest difference was that I used basically all the pans and all the spoons in the kitchen!
I am certainly not going to cook a multi-part meal from scratch every night, but now my life has no commuting and many of my social things are restricted, I more often have time and enthusiasm for that level of cooking. But I'm slightly bored of most of my repertoire. Now that I'm pretty confident our supply chains are robust and I can reliably get hold of even non-standard ingredients, I would like to try some new things.
Would anyone like to suggest or swap recipes? What do you make on a weeknight that's easy but satisfying? What do you make when you have time and energy to cook, but short of actual formal entertaining (which isn't pandemic-appropriate anyway)?
