What Dreams May Come

Last weekend I had my neighbours over for breakfast and dinner. They've been flattering me since I sent over a plate of my chocolate chip cookies, made them some authentic fougasse, and asked them to sample my Thai-Mexican fried chicken.

To be complimented on my cooking by anyone is always a great treat for me, but to be complimented by French people makes me shy. I think it's because I am greatly inspired by American cuisine and naturally assume that French people won't appreciate it. I fry a lot. I use lots of flavour combinations not found in French cuisine. When I'm asked I refer to my cooking style as hodgepodge, a word that has no real translation in French but prompts me to attempt a poetic and delicious sounding explanation.

I didn't think anything about it when my neighbour started to ask me questions about what kind of a restaurant I'd want to open in Paris. What I would serve, when, how, and where. Then he told me he wanted to introduce me to his cousin who is looking to invest in a restaurant; how he's been talking about my cooking and thinks I'd be a brilliant choice to be its chef.

To be truthful I wish I'd answered his questions differently, but I didn't know it was a test of sorts. More than once I've leaned towards the idea that I should make my living involved with food - and in Brooklyn I did for four months. I ran a small take out place out of my loft. I had paid my rent for the year, had a little pocket money, and didn't really care about making a profit. I stuffed menus under the doors of my neighbours, many of whom had suggested I start a take out place after dinners at my place, and had so many orders the first week I had to put a badly hand painted "first come, first served" sign on my front door.

For one month my little takeout place (called Chez Ama) served something different every night until my customers started writing their requests on the menus. They wanted more fried chicken, chicken & sausage gumbo, lamb curry, and what they called my "fancy Chinese food" (which was just authentic Chinese food).

So before I meet with the cousin I need to get my thoughts in order.

If I could open my restaurant anywhere in Paris, anywhere at all, I'd want to have a lunch stall at the Marché des Enfants Rouges.

Located in the 3e arrondissement, between rue de Bretagne and rue Charlot, it's quite a happening spot. There's a few types of cuisine to choose from - couscous, Italian, Japanese, African - and lots of outdoor seating that means it's packed on nice days. The market closes before dinner, so lunch would be the only meal to serve, and because it's always packed the clientelle are more accepting of delays and hiccups.

It has its downsides as a location. The competition is delicious. My favourite Japanese restaurant would be one of them. I couldn't see the other restaurants being happy about a fusion cuisine restaurant when they're marketing themselves as authentic straightforward examples of the cuisines they offer. Plus the places in the market are expensive. The Japanese place offers a sort of bento lunch around 12,00 euros. It's not a lot of food for the money, but delicious and fresh and I don't mind shelling out for it now and then.

I could think of other locations where the lunch traffic would probably keep a restaurant in business even if the dinner crowd was much quieter, but dinner is more fun to cook.

And what would I cook? I think that depends on what I can find. I'd want to source locally. I wouldn't cook in season because the variety is limiting, but as locally as possible when possible. I'd offer two or three choices for entrees, plats, and desserts - with a few favourites always on the menu.

But the cooking would be home style. Nothing fancy or poofy or posh or chic just to jack the prices up. Just delicious food at reasonable prices using the full repetoire of my cooking abilities.

I'd serve American, French, Korean, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Lebanese, Filipino, Chinese, Moroccan, Italian, Japanese mixing up taste, ingredients, and cooking techniques. Food I'd serve at home to friends and with the same kind of feeling. Lots of mismatched dishes rescued from flea markets and sidewalk sales and thrift shops in a cosy room with large tables and comfortable chairs. I'd come out of the kitchen now and then, and wouldn't have to make excuses when the cooking drags me away like I do at home.

So if my blog strays from book talk to cook talk, it's because I'll be giving a lot of thought to the recipes I'd want to use. Maybe my dream will become reality. Maybe not. That's the beauty of food really. Even if taste testing everything means my bathroom scale might be groaning a bit more in the future.

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Japanese Kare (Curry)

I'm a huge fan of Japanese kare. It is a staple of Japanese fast food and can be made at home quickly thanks to the pre-packaged bricks you can find in most Asian supermarkets. Just fry up some onions then brown some beef, potato cubes, and carrots, cook some rice and you've got a meal in under 45 minutes. But the pre-packaged curry is full of MSG and things with chemical sounding names. I wanted to see if I could make it from scratch.

I found plenty of recipes online for making kare roux from scratch. The overwhelming consensus in the twenty or so recipes I peeked at was to melt butter into flour, add spices, and heat to thicken up - much like making gravy.

The recipe I used called for:

3 T butter
1/4 cup flour
2 T garam masala
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 T of ketchup (or tomato paste)
1 T of tonkatsu sauce (or Worcestershire sauce)
Lots of fresh ground black pepper

But even glancing at the recipe I saw it had flaws, the first being, how much salt? The pre-packaged curry mixes are notoriously salty, using MSG to achieve the right salty taste. Japanese kare is greatly inspired by Indian curry and those call for plenty of salt too.

Now I used tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce, but as I tasted the curry there was another flavour missing. It didn't have that slight sweetness. Now ketchup would have sugar, as well as tonkatsu sauce, and maybe that explains why the sweetness was off?

It was also missing a sort of creaminess. I thought that the original recipe calling for butter instead of oil would give the kare its usual creamy taste, but it didn't.

I went back and peeked at the recipes again to fill in the gaps of the recipe.

A common ingredient in the other recipes was just straightforward curry powder. Garam masala is used to finish spicing curries in Indian cuisine and is combination of ground cloves, cinnamon, black & white cumin seeds, black & white pepper, and black, brown, & green cardamon pods.  Curry powder contains spices not included in garam masala such as ground coriander, turmeric, mustard seed, and ground ginger.

Truthfully to my palate the recipe I used as is was inedible. So inedible that I almost considered chucking it all together and making something else for dinner instead of the kimchi tonkatsu curry don (bread pork filets smothered with spicy curry and served with rice and kimchi that is served in fast food joints and street food stalls in both Korea and Japan) I was looking forward to. In the end I decided to try and save it. Here's what I consider an improved upon recipe, that is even more flavourful than the packaged stuff, and better for you too.

3 T butter
1/4 c. flour
1 tsp curry powder

1. Dissolve the flour and curry powder in the butter over very low heat.  Once you have a "paste", add:

1/2 c finely minced onions
3 cloves finely minced garlic
1 inch of finely ground ginger
1 T sugar

2. Fry over low heat until fragrant and add:

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or more or less depending on your tastes, but it should be spicy)

3. Slowly add 1 1/2 - 2 c. chicken stock, making sure to slowly dissolve the paste into the liquid. Stir constantly over med-low heat, until the curry thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Stir in garam masala, 2 T of whole milk, and remove from heat.

4. Set aside uncovered, stir occasionally until curry cools completely.

5. Prepare whatever you will serve the curry with.

* If you want to make tonkatsu kare,  salt the pork filets and let sit in the fridge for an hour before dipping them in egg wash and coating them with a nice coating of panko (Japanese style breadcrumbs), and fry in sunflower oil until golden brown and cooked through. Let pork filet rest about 10 minutes.

Serve in a large bowl with a rounded scoop of rice (I pack rice into rice bowls and then overturn them into the serving bowl), cut breaded pork filets into strips, scoop the kare into the bowl around the rice, and garnish with pork strips (and kimchi).

** If you want Japanese beef kare, peel and halve an onion and cut into thin half moon slices. Saute the onions in 1 T of sunflower oil, add beef and brown, followed by potatoes and carrots. Add the kare to the meat and vegetables, and let simmer over low heat until potatoes and carrots are tender through. Serve with steamed rice and pickled radish.

Bon appetit or, rather,

잘 먹겠습니다 ! (jal meokkesseumnida)

どうぞめしあがれ ! (douzo meshiagare)

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