Curry In Brief

You may consider this blog a follow-up to my last, “Butter Chicken Adventures.”  Last night, I tried another recipe from Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India. It is the recipe that fronts the main recipe section of the book, and is on a page titled “Making a Simple Homestyle Curry.” Here is the recipe as I found it:

4 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, very finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4-inch piece of fresh ginger, chopped
3/4 teaspoon coriander powder
a pinch of tumeric powder
1/4 teaspoon cumin powder
1/4 teaspoon garam masala powder
1 teaspoon paprika powder
2 tomatoes, chopped
salt
chopped cilantro leaves for garnish

1) Heat the oil in a heavy pan. Add the onion and saute over a medium heat for about 20-25 minutes or until deep brown. Add the garlic and ginger and fry for 1 minute. Add the coriander powder and stir for another full minute. Then add the turmeric, cumin, garam masala, and paprika, and saute for 30 seconds. Add 1 cup of water and cook for 10 minutes. Put in the tomatoes, stir well, and cook for a further 5 minutes.

2) Now the curry sauce is ready. Add salt to taste. Put in … chicken, lamb, fish or vegetables. Add 1 1/2 cups of water for chicken, 2 1/2 cups for lamb, 1 cup for fish, 2 cups for vegetables. Cook until done. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro leaves just before serving.

I followed this recipe more or less exactly, except instead of fresh tomatoes I used canned. I doubled the entire recipe, so there would be leftovers, except I did not double the water at the end; I used broccoli and chickpeas as my veggies. Two thoughts: one, as with my previous curry from this book, I found – and this time, Ted also found – this dish to be underflavored. It was a good spice mix, it just wasn’t potent enough. Because of my prior experience with Camellia’s curry, I used heaping spice measurements, but this proved insufficient to combat the problem – all of the flavoring ingredients seem to need doubled (or quadrupled in my case, since I had already doubled all of the ingredients to take the dish from one meant to serve two to one meant to serve four). Two, the sauce was much too watery, something Sarah warned me might happen with the recipes in this book. I cooked off as much of the water as I could before my broccoli began to get too soft, but still – if I were to make this again, I would just omit the last addition of water altogether: the liquid in the can of tomatoes would have more than sufficed, along with the liquid that naturally bleeds off vegetables when they cook. Oh, and be forewarned: getting the onions deep brown actually took more than 30 minutes (though this might have been from my use of two onions instead of one), and required a fair amount of stirring and vigilance to prevent them from burning.

Also … y’know, it just didn’t taste like a restaurant dish.

But it wasn’t bad, and it was certainly healthy, so I’m not saying I wouldn’t recommend it per se.

“Mary Fucking Poppins.”

In contemplating my inaugural blog for this site, I found myself growing increasingly pensive. With what topic should I begin? What impression should I make? There’s much to talk about in the news, I’ve several social activism subjects close to my heart, I’ve even got a topic in law or two that I think might be of general interest. These kinds of topics all require research and drafting, though, and that seemed daunting – I’d already been procrastinating on a daunting professional project, and there I was, procrastinating on a personal project as well.

Before Sarah approached me about writing a Pittsburgh lady blog together, I’d been ruing the fact that I no longer blogged on my own. I had previously been a MySpace blogger (yes, 100 years ago), and then I had graduated to my own website (some blogs from which I plan to repost here, as I still think they are of their interest and enjoyable). An entire website had proven too time consuming, and I don’t know that it got much traffic anyway. My blogging lapsed. Blogging, of course, it must be said, is not a necessity – everyone enjoys a little narcissism, and are usually willing to indulge it in others, but it’s not as though there is an audience hungering for my thoughts on the tyranny of other people’s Facebook posts, the awful, interminable nature of basketball, or the former Pope’s beatification. Nevertheless, I am actually a trained writer (and a big Fuck You to the University of Michigan, but that’s a subject for another day), and I always have a vague sense that I should be writing, though it’s not really a pursuit of mine anymore, excepting academic work.

I had conceived a blog that I might begin myself. In my head, I had already titled it “The Duncan Street Palimpsest” and I planned to make it a repository of many projects and meanderings I wished to undertake. For instance, I am constantly saying that I will cook more, and so I thought I could do recipe blogs; I am constantly saying that I want to improve my knitting skills, and so I thought I could chronicle my crafting challenges; similarly, I am constantly asserting my desire to learn to sew, to garden, and to in general undertake the kind of betterment of self through skill acquirement that ambitious bloggers have been documenting for years now as they cook their way through massive tomes, recycle rubber bands into minidresses, and create communities for social justice activism and fatshion haute couture.

The problem, of course, is that I almost never undertake these projects. There are all sorts of explanations that a casual observer might surmise to be the cause of this inaction – laziness, fearfulness of failure, a variety of other unpleasant character traits.

As to fearing failure: meh. I’m pushing 30 and haven’t yet earned enough money, total, over my lifetime, to qualify for social security. I have two degrees I don’t use, I’m overdue on pretty much every bill, and none of this troubles me at all. I don’t pluck my eyebrows or shave my legs, and my dining room is filthy at the moment. I’ve got a different sense of the word failure than other people do, let’s say.

In my further defense, let me say that I am lazy, but not when I find the work to be important or enjoyable. I’m a good employee (I teach part-time), I’ve donated hundreds of hours of my time in the past to local political campaigns, I devote time to my own academic pursuits, and I read in my spare time with an eye towards what I hope is my intellectual improvement – nonfiction on various subjects, classics of literature, et cetera. But, true enough, I am sometimes lazy: if the task seems thankless or unimportant – say, that time I worked answering phones for a living – I do the bare minimum, if that. I don’t feel bad about this, either; my time and energy are finite and precious to me, and I see no reason to fritter them on anything other than what I personally wish. “Pride in a job well done,” without taking into account the nature of the job, is a capitalist lie inculcated in the working classes (blue- and gray-collar) to discourage them from refusing to work at degrading tasks for the enrichment of others, and I’ve no truck with that, thank you.

Still, learning to knit or sew, gardening, cooking, deploying my writing to the work of a worthwhile activist community, expressing myself through art or photography or music … these are not thankless or unimportant tasks. Many people undertake them with joy in their hearts and soon see gratifying results. And yet …

Well, a friend of mine put her finger on the problem quickly and succinctly: “You don’t want to do that shit. You just want to be the sort of person who does that shit. You want to be Mary Fucking Poppins.”

I think she’s right; I think, in the cases of many of my ambitions, I don’t actually want to do that shit – I just want to be the sort of person who does. Who doesn’t want to move through the world productively and creatively, mindful and ever-improving, delighting in the growth of skills and the expansion of interests, and receiving the just accolades of all who bear witness to their march of progress?

Except that shit’s hard. And there’s school, work, housekeeping (shudder), maintaining personal relationships, errands … and then I’m supposed to exercise, follow the news, do the basics that a human is supposed to do, I guess, and frankly, once all or at least a respectable amount of that is accomplished, I want to sit on my ass and read a book with a cat in my lap. Go to the bar. Go on a date. Take a fucking nap.

Still, I’m not a child, and I should make myself do some of the shit done by the people who are the sort of people who do that shit. I should write thoughtfully and undertake some of those projects; I should improve myself before I’m dead (though why I should do this, I can’t quite say).

Sarah says I’m completely thwarting the premise of this blog, which is meant to be the solution to both she and I feeling overwhelmed trying to take on bigger and more extensive blogging projects. Just write something. Toss something off. Whatever’s on my mind, it doesn’t have to be a project. That’s good advice. And you see, today, I’ve taken it – this blog required no research, no drafting, and no careful consideration whatsoever, nor did it require me to knit, sew, cook, read, watch, visit, learn, or work in general. High fives all around?

Still, in the future, I’d like to, y’know, maybe try to do some stuff. So if you see me blogging about falteringly attempting accomplishment, pat me on the back, internet-style. But if you also see me running on about where I just had dinner, y’know … don’t hold it against me. We can’t all be Mary Fucking Poppins.