Copycat Curry

You've seen this before, and rather recently, too. My copycat curry that I stole from Peter. Lovely stuff, especially when it's cold and nasty out. You can clicky the link if you want the recipe.

But, it's not the curry I wanted to tell you about today, it's the curry powder.

Now, I know that one can make one's own from various spices and that, if one is a truly dedicated foodie, one does. I don't. No matter what that says about me, I am fine with the ones I can buy in the store. I've used Spice Islands for years - I love that heavy, musky, rich flavor.

But I have a new love now. Having run out of my usual brand, I rushed down to the local market and discovered that they carry an organic brand of spices with the cutesy moniker of Spicely. They come in small containers, so it's easier to use them up before they lose potency and the curry flavor is even better than my previous love. No salt is added, either, which is good for our blood pressures. The flavor is strong and rich but not too spicy, rather like my previous brand.

I guess I could have taken a picture of the little plastic container but doesn't the copycat curry look more appetizing?

Currying Favor

I owe this curry to Peter Barrett, who gave me the idea to use my leftover kabocha squash soup as a base for curry. I would never have thought of that but it makes so much sense!

When I pulled my pot of soup out of the fridge and My Beloved raised the lid, the expression on his face told me he was not, and I do mean, not looking forward to another go-around with that soup. While he is normally fine with leftovers and he did enjoy the first serving of the soup, he's also a variety guy and loves a mix of tastes and flavors.

Providence smiled upon me when that same day I read that Peter had concocted curry from soup himself. Being the cheerful plagiarist that I am, I immediately stole his idea.

I sautéed a chopped onion in butter, then added some chunked carrot and fingerling potatoes for a Thai-style curry with vegetables. I even dumped in the very last serving of those colorful roasted veggies I made for Thanksgiving. I whisked curry powder into the soup, then poured both into the pot with the veggies, stirred and simmered for about 15 minutes. While the curry was cooking, I crisped a few rashers of bacon to crumble and set out (Peter's) little dishes of peanuts, green onion, raisins, chutney and minced white onion. I think of the toppings as more typical of Indian curry but we love the crunch and mix of flavors so I added them to the Thai-style as well. For the last few minutes, I stirred in about a cup of chicken picked from the roast one I made that week, just to heat it through before serving over jasmine rice.

The result was simply lovely, hearty and yet not heavy, savory and a little spicy without being nuclear, with lots of texture and sweet-salt toppings. I hope my variety guy won't mind - there's enough left over for dinner again tonight.

Currying Flavor

This has been a weird summer. While our blogging pals just across the bay have been complaining of too-hot days, we have had an unusually cool summer over here, only about 10 miles distant. Still, there are compensations for the lack of warm weather - such as lamb curry. If this were high summer, such a warm dish would be unwelcome. In our cool summer, it was awesome.

I made the sauce by browning my lamb chunks in olive oil, sautéeing a chopped onion in the same pan, then adding the goozle left over from the pork roast I cooked in the crock pot 'way back in June and subsequently froze. When it had cooked down even further, I added the curry flavoring. We always enjoy all the toppings one puts on curry, so I chopped green and white onion, bacon bits, peanuts, raisins, hard-cooked eggs and chutney to add salty, sweet and savory flavors at the table.

The resulting curry was milder than my usual in terms of curry flavor and spiciness but far, far richer in taste. The pork goozle gave the dish some serious "bottom" on which to layer all those other textures and flavors, a dark richness that's hard to describe and hard to stop eating, too. I'm going to have to make more goozle - clearly it is the secret ingredient to add richness to just about any dish when you are currying flavor.

Pocket Lunch

I'm continually surprised by how delicious lunch can be when scrounged out of stuff we already have in the house. I was feeling lazy and didn't want to go out shopping one day this week - but I managed to salvage a lunch and a dinner out of leftovers and ingredients already in the fridge.

These pita sandwiches are a good case in point. I had the pitas on hand and a leftover half a chicken from dinner the night before. I cubed about a cup of the chicken, added chopped broccoli and peeled, seeded, cubed cucumber, mixing them with a sauce made of a dab of mayo, the juice from half a lemon, a splash of milk and heaping tablespoon of curry powder.* Stuffed the chicken mixture into the pita pockets and it was a lovely lunch, easy to make and I didn't even have to leave the kitchen, much less the house!

*If you're making something similar, start with less curry powder and taste - different brands vary in strength and this one might be too spicy for some people.

The Glorious Gmish

I love curry. I love everything about curry - the tangy sauce, the fluffy rice and the sprinkle of sweet, salt and savory toppings. I would eat curry weekly if My Beloved didn't put the brakes on.

Recently, I had some leftover chicken, which always gets me thinking "Curry!" but I had neglected to restock my pantry with cream of chicken soup, my usual base for the sauce. (I learned to cook in the early '70s when most dishes began with a can of soup and have never found any reason to change this particular recipe, as it makes great curry.) I didn't feel like a return to the store and my taste buds were all set for curry so I decided to improvise.

Turns out curry sauce is dead simple to concoct. I sauteed a chopped onion in butter, then made a basic white sauce* in the same pan and added curry powder to taste. We like our curry deep yellow but not too spicy - different curry powders have different levels of heat so start with a little and keep tasting as you add more until you get the desired level of taste vs. spice. Add bite-size pieces of chicken, shrimp, lamb, beef - any meat you like - and vegetarians can use big beans, mushrooms or chunks of tofu in place of the meat.

We topped ours with raisins, peanuts, mango chutney, crumbled bacon, chopped hard boiled egg, sliced green onion and minced white onion. Other ideas are shredded coconut or fresh, finely ground coffee beans but, really, you can use anything that seems tasty and exotic to you. Just pile it all on, mix it all up and enjoy the glorious gmish!


*2 Tbs. butter, 2 Tbs. flour, 2 Cups milk. Melt the butter, cook the flour in it for a few minutes, then slowly add the milk as the sauce forms and thickens. Add more milk if needed until sauce reaches the desired consistency.

Cool Curry Salad

My Beloved and I are hot weather wimps, having lived so long in the cool Bay area where spring temperatures are likely to hover around 65F; when the thermometer rises about 75F, we start to wilt. At 88+, we become melting puddles of whine.

Little did I know when I set out to use up some leftover brown rice from Massa Organics, that I would invent a great salad for a blistering hot Northern California day. I was just thinking of all the good, fresh veggies I'd like to add to the rice, never suspecting that the weather was going to turn from coolish to ovenish overnight.

I love curry flavor so I used that as the baseline, mixing curry powder with about a walnut of mayo and a blob of ricotta cheese I found at the back of the fridge (still good!). I added some lemon juice, as the mayo-ricotta was too bland and ended up adding a full juicy lemon's worth (make your curry sauce much more tart than you ultimately want, as the bland veggies will buffer it).

Then I chopped some celery, scallions, raw broccoli florets and added biggish chunks of ripe avocado and fresh English peas, and mixed those into the curried rice in about a 1-1 ratio of rice to veggies. Tasted it, and it was pretty good but it still lacked a little something so I thought to add raisins to get some sweet into the tart/savory blend, They were perfect, adding visual punch as well as a sweet note. I would have added bacon bits if I had had any. A little S&P and you're there.

The finished salad was delicious next to the cold chicken we had left over from the previous night's mint chicken and even good the second day, when the weather turned even hotter.

Would somebody please call the Fog Man and tell him we're ready for relief?