Atomic Nerds

Sorry for the long break in the series; lately we’ve been busy enough that even Stingray’s time and energy for cooking experimentation has suffered, and since my slowness in preparation means at least two hours and often more knocked out of any given evening, I just haven’t been up to bat lately.

Given that time has been such a factor lately, the latest cookbook I bought was Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express, which is organized as seasonal recipes that can supposedly be made in twenty minutes or less*. This was intended as a means to keep up the variety I like without bogging Stingray down in baroque preparations; Stingray flipped through it, noted that Bittman rarely provides any sort of measurement whatsoever, and figured it would therefore make for hilarious posting material**. So, he took the first recipe I had flagged as interesting- a hash of sweet potato, onions, and salmon in a coconut milk-based curry sauce- and cheerfully informed me it would get made when I made it.

So be it. The recipe:

Heat some vegetable oil and cook a thinly sliced onion and a minced clove of garlic for a couple of minutes until soft; add a tablespoon or so of curry powder and stir until fragrant. Add a can of coconut milk, a couple of diced sweet potatoes, a generous squeeze of lime juice, a few dashes of fish sauce if you like, and some minced fresh ginger; bring to a boil and simmer until sweet potato is almost tender, about five minutes. Cut a couple of skinless salmon fillets into half-inch cubes and add them to the pan; reduce to a simmer and cook until the fish is just done, about five minutes more. Garnish with fresh chopped cilantro and serve over basmati rice.

1. Since entire recipe must be read through and carefully parsed to determine what ingredients are necessary, read through a few times. Determine that fresh ginger isn’t happening and pester the spouse about an appropriate amount of powdered ginger, since no amount of fresh ginger was given that you could third. Pester the spouse about where the hell the curry powder is after demolishing half the cabinets in the kitchen. (Bonus points if he’s trying to divide his attention between you and a complex video game procedure.) Rescue the unopened, never-used fish sauce from the back of the cupboard. Marvel at the fact that spouse has not yet fled.

2. This recipe contains the hilarious assumption that you will be able to quickly process all ingredients in the time it takes for, say, vegetable oil to heat up or sweet potato to cook until just tender. Enjoy a hearty belly laugh, then arrange sweet potato, onion, garlic, knife, and cutting board. Revisit your sweet potato dicing protocol and distribute chunks of sweet potato to various vessels as they overflow. Ponder how it could be possible that sweet potatoes actually seem to be much larger on the inside than the outside. Decide that one is probably enough, given these sweet potatoes are only slightly smaller than volleyballs.

3. Chop the top and bottom off the onion and peel. Start slicing it. Prepare to OH GOD FUCK FUCK THE PAIN RUN AWAY

4. Finish washing your eyes and nose and ponder strategy while spouse wonders why his eyes are stinging even though he’s retreated to another room. Onions apparently vary in the amounts of irritating compounds they contain; consider sourcing this particular one and reporting the farmer to the Department of Homeland Security, as this one definitely qualifies as a biological weapon. Slink back into the kitchen and forget about “thinly sliced”, as all you can manage through the film of tears and mucus is a fast and violent mince. Just be happy you still have all your fingers and plan to work on knife technique later.

5. Mince the garlic. Muse further on the subject of why no company has patented a garlic-based adhesive yet, as you can never get more than about half of a given clove because the rest is sticking to the knife, your fingers, the counter, and passing air molecules. Add the garlic to the onion for convenience’s sake since they’ll both be going into the pan together anyway. Scrape as much of the allium paste off your cutting board as you can manage and prepare to square off with the salmon.

6. Unwrap the salmon and plop it skin-side down. We can handle this; we got lessons in skinning a salmon from an expert just recently, after all. Carefully slide your knife between the meat and the skin and start drawing the knife slowly but smoothly between them. Curse vigorously as you make a deep cut into the flesh. Curse more as you try again and wind up slicing off a small square of skin. Flip the fish back over against instruction and mangle your way through the rest of the skin removal; be sure to trim the larger cuts of flesh back off the removed skin and add it back to your pile of disassembled fish. Not so much “cubes” as “pieces”, but close enough for curry.

Heat some vegetable oil and cook a thinly sliced onion and a minced clove of garlic for a couple of minutes until soft; add a tablespoon or so of curry powder and stir until fragrant.

7. Pour in… enough vegetable oil to expand and coat the bottom of your chosen sautee pan. (High-sided as spouse suggested so you can toss around the ingredients without losing too much of it.) Heat until… some value of hot. Dump in your vegetable tear gas and stir it around a bit with a nonconductive implement. Since “until soft” isn’t a very useful measure without actually reaching in and probing the food, cook it until some pieces are translucent and it is no longer so volatile.

8. “Stir until fragrant” is a really hilarious instruction, given that hayfever has entirely robbed you of your sense of smell, to the point that the cooking onions and garlic have no detectable scent. Stir the vegetables and curry powder until the entire slurry has turned yellow-orange.

Add a can of coconut milk, a couple of diced sweet potatoes, a generous squeeze of lime juice, a few dashes of fish sauce if you like, and some minced fresh ginger; bring to a boil and simmer until sweet potato is almost tender, about five minutes.

9. You can stop fretting about the imprecision of “a can” as a measure (what SIZE can?), because you’ll be far too busy ransacking the kitchen for the can opener in the limited time available before the onions and garlic burn and irredeemably ruin the meal. You can stop when your spouse, taking pity and joining the search, notices that the can opener cannot be seen because it is underneath the cookbook. Open the coconut milk and dump it in, stirring until the mixture is once again a uniform yellow-orange.

10. Now is the optimum time to discover that, despite using it for margaritas, water flavoring, Cuban pork roasts, lime pie, and myriad other things, you have somehow managed to run out of lime juice without noticing. Toss in some lemon juice; not the same, but at least it’s a citrus-based acid. Add the powdered ginger (half a teaspoon was the spousal recommendation) and shake the fish sauce bottle a few times; perhaps because a condiment comprised of fermented fish and mollusk innards is a powerful flavoring, only a drop or two will emerge at a time. Now it’s time to be bored for five minutes. You can occupy some of your time neurotically fiddling with the dial of your burner, given that the term “simmer” covers everything from a not-too-brisk boil to heat so low you can hold your hand directly over the burner without injury.

11. Make that seven minutes. Damn altitude.

12. Introduce your salmon bits and stir. Poke it about for a bit, then remember that you were supposed to serve this mess over rice. A soundtrack of kazoo music is optional for the frantic retrieval of a box of minute rice, inopportune discovery that the minute rice box has already been opened and not in a fashion that can be resealed, and blessing of the kitchen with a festive drift of dry rice. Get the remaining rice combined with water and set to boil while your spouse wanders in with a vacuum.

13. Mostly pink with a spot of darker pink in the middle is probably “just done”, and unfortunately for you you passed that about a minute ago. It’s cooked plenty; remove from heat and wait for the minute rice to be done. Ladle starch-and-fish curry slurry over servings of rice and consume.

To Mr. Bittman’s credit, this withstood imprecision and frantic moments well and was pretty good. I thought it was rather bland and liberally seasoned mine with salt, pepper, and fish sauce; Stingray opined that this was due to the whole “no sense of smell” thing and needed no such treatment for his portion. Either way, it was far more of a success than the chaos that attended it would have predicted, and I’d make it again, possibly with some Sriracha and more fish sauce during the cooking phase. I didn’t use the cilantro because neither of us is terribly fond of the stuff; it goes well in some settings, but as a garnish we leave it alone. If you like it better, feel free.

*Lies.

**Lies.

Posted Cooking Noob, Food |