Chris Amirault

Stock over shlock? Mais oui! As someone who spent yesterday making a really great daube de boeuf, I certainly agree with this. Next time, you can suggest that the friend bring over a nice bottle of cotes du rhone, sit down, and share a glass while the bones simmer. At least you'll find it therapeutic!

Several cook books mentioned this, and said that, if your onion is cooking too quickly, you should not only turn the heat down a bit but add a couple of tablespoons of cold water. I had to do that once or twice.

Makes sense, I think. The additional simmering time of the entire curry, while it may tame some of the onion, probably doesn't have the same effect as that long sauteeing of the onion by itself. Seems like whatever chemical effect occurs when that onion is just in oil wouldn't be replicated with everything else in there. Perhaps we need an onion sautee volunteer to play Harold McGee -- though given how long it has taken to get the smell of sauteeing onions out of our back hall, I don't think my family will allow it to be me!

Without question, the best wine store in the Providence area is Town Wine and Spirits in East Providence. They do great case discounts and have a crack staff run by Elliot Fishbein. (They also have a single malt scotch selection that was touted for years as the best in the US.) Campus is great (I go there all the time), and Gasparro's on Federal Hill is the best place for Italian wine, by far. But Town is tops.

Virtually everything I do in the kitchen is therapeutic to me. I love cutting stuff up (butchering, dicing, you name it), in particular. But... honestly, I can't think of anything that I don't enjoy doing that involves food. Emptying the dish washer, now that sucks.

Erin, do you have good directions to get there? I've been dying to go but, honestly, I'm terrified to drive around East Providence without a good map, two days' supply of food and water, and a full tank of gas, for fear of getting utterly lost.

Makes sense to me, too -- given the 45-50 minutes I had to brown my onions above.

We were part of a CSA two years back, and decided that the plan didn't really correspond to our interests. We got half a share, I think, but ended up with too much red leaf lettuce.... However, we know lots of people who have had very good experiences with shares. The pickups have been on Broadway, up on Wickenden St, and elsewhere. Some of the CSAs sell at the farmers' markets, especially at Hope High School and on Broad Street. We're on their mailing list, so I'll post the information here when we get it.

I just reread that and want to make it clear that I in no way was being sarcastic about "precious, precious morels." Quite the opposite: I would treat morels the way Gollum treats the ring.... In Montana a couple of years ago, we gathered several dozen morels and packed them to travel back to the east coast in (big mistake) a plastic bag. We then got held over in Minneapolis for a night. By the time we got to Providence, we had rotten, awful morel mush.

I was surprised to read this. Do you folks rinse your precious, precious morels?

One must overvalue at least a few things in life, and spend accordingly, don't cha think?

I agree with Fifi. I think that there are a few basic techniques (the browning of the onions, the toasting of spices) and ingredients (usually onion, ginger, garlic -- though not always all three -- cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, kala jeera, etc.) that you can use with a variety of ingredients. There also seems to be fewer hard-and-fast rules about what must go in what dish (unlike, say, cassoulet or gumbo) -- but that may be my ignorance talking. Also, Fifi, it's my understanding that south Indian or Keralan cuisine use coconut milk in their curries. Perhaps you could give that a go?

Just got it and we love it. It's very well balanced, and has a great train-like whistle. It's also black, not brushed stainless, I'm afraid -- thank you eBay! -- but the water, strangely, tastes fine....

You're welcome! And, yes, that sounds about right -- closer to 1 1/2 c, I think.

Yes, more turmeric than I usually use, too. I always toast and grind my own cumin, because we use so much of it. But the coriander this time was pre-ground (from Penzeys).

Yeah, I thought of that when I was stirring.... My only excuse is that this recipe is heavy on the minced onion -- and a massive amount of curry!

As I mentioned in my PM, John, be sure to hit Rue Lepic in Montmartre and bring a shopping bag. There's a great fish market at the top of the street, two great butchers, and several other shops for cheese, wine, produce, etc. We stayed for a week nearby and shopped there nearly daily.

I've started cooking the lamb curry, adapted from Julie Sahni's book. I'm doubling the recipe, so I've got: 4 lbs cubed lamb the bones from the lamb 1 medium onion, sliced 1/4 c corn oil 1/2 c ghee 10 (yes, 10) onions, minced in the food processor thick, 3 inch piece of ginger minced, about 4 T eight garlic cloves, minced, about 3 T 1 T cayenne powder (we like it hot) 2 T ground, toasted cumin 3 T coriander seed, ground 1 T turmeric, ground a few cinnamon sticks about ten cardamom pods two cans diced tomatoes four diced potatoes (going in later) Here are the spices: Browning the lamb: Sahni points out, as do many other folks, that drying off the meat makes for better browning: The browned lamb (I used the oil for this, not the precious ghee): A quick stock instead of water, with the sliced onion and the lamb bones: When I'm mincing ten onions, I'm glad that I wear contact lenses : The minced ginger and garlic (and a cooking aid in the background): So, when I first made a curry, it sucked, because I didn't have the patience and stamina to cook the minced onions properly. You have to brown them for real, not just kinda brown, and you have to stir the little bastids pretty much constantly (not like risotto constantly, or even roux constantly; I can cheat with those two, not here). Thus, here are the stages of the onion browning, which took longer bc I had about eight cups of minced onion (!!). Note, also, that a flat-edged wooden "spoon" is better than a curved one, since you have to scrape, scrape, scrape that bottom, and having a larger edge is easier on the wrist (though, sad to say, not easy): onions at start: Onions at 10 minutes: Onions at 20 minutes: Onions at 30 minutes: Onions at 35 minutes, when I added the ginger and garlic: Onions, ginger, and garlic at 40 minutes (almost there): Onions, ginger, and garlic at 45 minutes, just before I added the spices, sauteed them for 30 sec, then dumped in the stock, lamb, and tomato: This is the curry simmering for 1 1/2 hrs; then, I'll add the four diced potatoes and cook it for another 30 minutes: Sahni says that you should let it sit for 30-120 minutes after that, which should bring us about to the start of the Oscars!

Looks amazing, Kristin! And making your own sausages, that's damned impressive!

Hmmm! I guess we're on a strange kind of ghee wavelength, eh, Fifi??

I had to make some ghee before starting the curry this afternoon, and I took a few snaps for folks who haven't made it before. It's very simple and just requires a good ear and eye. So: four sticks -- a pound -- of unsalted butter into the pan on medium heat: For a while, after melting, it bubbles around; the white solids mingle and the water is boiling off hard: After a while, the soilds drop to the bottom, but it still boils (thanks to the lousy US butter, with quite a bit of moisture still trapped in it): This is the crucial moment. You can see that the bubbling has turned into light foaming; if you could hear it, you'd listen as the crackly, bubbly popping gets quieter and quieter until it's nearly silent: At the bottom, you will see that the white solids are starting to darken into a light brown. At this point, you're pretty much ready to strain it through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a pyrex bowl or measuring cup: See the brown bits on the pan? That's what you don't want in the ghee (along with any water, but that's boiled off by this point). You now have golden, clear ghee, aka clarified butter, ready to go:

Man oh man, Patti! You can pimp my kitchen any time!! Where'd you get those spice shelves? I have a gazillion Penzeys' jars taking up two full drawers in our dining room side board. And I'm definitely going to buy some pantry door stuff holder thingies!! Snowangel, another addictive thread!

This is just a fantastic thread, Johnny! I've been scarfing them up, buying them at $6/# at Whole Foods here in Prov, for weeks since your tip-off. Thanks!

On to the pork or beef question! I didn't forget you, Kristin!Here's what Julie Sahni has to say in her great Classic Indian Cooking in her recipe for "Goanese Hot and Pungent Curry (Vendaloo)": The recipe (for about 1 1/2 lbs of pork) creates a marinade with the Indian equivalent of the holy trinity (onion, garlic, ginger) as well as some pan-roasted and ground spices, cider vinegar, and oil and marinates the meat for 8 hrs at room temperture (!) or for 48 hours in the fridge (!!). Cooking is with some tamarind pulp, onions, and a few other things, including the left-over marinade.

Not that this answers your question exactly, but here's an excerpt from the wonderful Alan Davidson's "Oxford Companion to food" that helps explain the confusion & gives the origin of the term: "Curry, a term adopted into the English Language from India, has changed it's meaning in migrating and had become ubiquitous as a menu word. It now denotes various kinds of dish in numerous different parts of the world; but all are savoury, and all spiced. The Tamil word kari is the starting point. It means a spiced sauce, one of the sorts of dressing taken in S. India with rice, and soupy in consistency. Different words in Tamil refer to stew-like dressings (meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, in small quantities) and to 'dry' dressings. Europeans however, fastened on the word kari and took it to mean any of these dressings. Hobson-Jobson (1903, Yule and Burnell, 1979) who gives the fullest (and most entertaining, but in some respects confused) account of the term's history up to the beginning of the 20th century, observes that the Portuguese took over the word in this manner, and cites evidence that a recipe for karil appeared in a 17th century Portuguese cookery book, probably reflecting a practice which had begun in the 16th century." ← My source -- Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat's History of Food -- also explains the reference to kari and tells the (old wives'?) tale of the Englishman Sharwood, who, when dining with the Maharaja of Madras in the late 19th century, was told about the spice shops that had contributed to the evening's dish. In the colonizing spirit of British empire-builders, he obtained a license to import the "Madras curry powder" to London, along with a sweet condiment from Bombay known as catri that he called "chutney." That is to say, to cook generic "lamb curry" using "curry powder" is already to cook something that is a colonial invention and not as authentic as, say, a specific dish like Chufi's rogan josh.