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)

Read more >>

Chicken Soup for All

One of the things I promised myself I would do, if I ever decided to open a restaurant was that I would feed people for free, so one of the things I'm working on as I move towards my deadline to move to Amsterdam August/September 2012 is finding delicious, budget friendly recipes because I'd like to open my restaurant one day a week where it's free to everyone and anyone.

Hence my chicken soup.

I don't eat soup out of a can, box, jar, not ever. It seems wrong somehow. If I want chicken soup what I do is buy two roasting chickens, roast them, eat the legs and thighs, and save the rest for the soup. For this recipe I stuffed and roasted the chickens with fennel, onions, cloves, green cardamons, black cardamons, and whole cloves of garlic after rubbing both the inside cavity and the outside of the chickens with olive oil, lemon juice, dried thyme, and dried rosemary.

Use the jus for whatever you're eating the dark meat with, but reserve about half for the chicken stock. The follow morning strip the chickens of skin and other undesirable things, making sure to put aside all the bones (except the third wing joint), leftover juices and fat, and cut the leftover chicken meat into bite size pieces. I also removed the cardamons and the cloves from the carcass before adding the bones, leftover garlic, chopped up stalk of fennel, an onion cut in half, and then salt and pepper to taste.

Make sure the water covers the bones completely and let boil for 2-3 hours, taste, and then reduce to a simmer. Let boil another 2 hours. Pour the contents of the soup pot into a fine mesh strainer, discard everything, and return strained broth to the original pot.

Here are the rest of the ingredients I used:

1/4 cup of peeled and finely chopped white potatoes
2 1/2 cups of peeled white potatoes cut into slightly bigger than bite sized pieces
2 carrots peeled and sliced (make sure to increase the thickness of the slices along the thinner part so all the carrots cook evenly)
1 zucchini sliced into fours, then chopped into bite sized cubes
1/2 cup white mushrooms sliced
1 onion cut into quarters
2 stalks of fennel (1/2 cup) cut into slices
1/8 cup fresh parsley
Salt and Pepper

Add the 1/4 cup of finely chopped potatoes and the bite sized piece of chicken and let boil about 15 - 20 minutes. When you notice the bits of potato have begun to break down (it thickens the broth a bit naturally for a more hearty taste), add the rest of the potatoes, fennel, onion, and carrots. Let simmer 10 - 15 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste and continue to simmer on lowest possible heat with the lid ajar.

Twenty minutes prior to serving, increase the heat to a slight boil and add the zucchini, mushrooms, and salt and pepper to taste if needed. When the zucchini is soft, yet still firm, turn off the heat, add the fresh parsley, taste, and add salt or pepper if needed. Cover for 2 minutes.

Ladle into soup bowls with just slightly more chicken and vegetables than broth. Serve with homemade bread rolls (recipe to come later) and sweet butter (called beurre doux in French).

Now the real point of this recipe, which will make so much soup I'll have to freeze it (about 3 liters or about 13 cups of soup), is how healthy and cheap it is to make.

Chickens: 11 euros
Vegetables:  3 euros

Now sixteen euros isn't deducting the fact that I served the thighs for two separate meals, so I really only used about 5 euros worth of chicken for the soup. Based on the average serving size, from one batch of soup I could feed over a dozen people.

When I open the kitchen it will be from 12 - 2 pm and once the food is gone - it'll be gone, but with 100 euros I could make 12 pots of chicken soup and feed 150 people. Now I can't realistically make 12 pots of soup in my kitchen or in the kitchen I hope to have in Amsterdam even, but I could make 3 or 4.

I could feed 50 people and spend less than I might spend on a dinner out.

This is part of my plan in Amsterdam. I'm going to feed people. I'm going to put the word out there that on Monday afternoons there is a place where you get a delicious, healthy meal and for free whether you're a successful businessman, a student, or someone who just wants to save a little extra money that Monday.

I'm going to put my faith in my chicken soup. This will be the first thing I'll serve for free lunch. Now I just need to find forty seven similar recipes to get me through a year of Mondays.

Read more >>

A Recipe (for life) from Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgeral was dubbed by her husband the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night) as "the first American flapper" and is (or should be) for any aspiring flâneuse-eur a sort of inspiration. Any aspiring flâneuse-eur would be flattered to be the embodiment of an entire era in history. Non? 

After her husband's success with the novel This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgeralds were nearly instant celebrities. Zelda had always welcomed the limelight, and welcomed the invitations and the parties - the jazz and the gin.

The Fitzgeralds were, colloquially speaking, drunks. An early version of Bonnie and Clyde except instead of robbing and stealing the Fitzgeralds drank to excess, took naps in chic Upper East Side sitting rooms, and went to party after party.

She was even drunk at the birth of her daughter and admitted as much."Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool".

The new father wasn't too inebriated to be present for his daughter's birth and the proof is in the plagarism. Daisy Buchanan would later utter the same words to her daughter in The Great Gatsby. 

 The Fitzgeralds quickly became accustomed to their new life as parents thanks to the extensive staff they employed of a nurse for Frances ("Scottie"), a couple who cleaned the house, and a laundress - who I like to imagine Zelda never once referred to as a laundry lady in the high-falutin' conversations she likely had with some of her top drawer chums.


It is Zelda's sort of exaggerated WASPishness that made me so curious about her in the first place. I Wiki'd her and my curiosity was rewarded with a sort of recette pour la vie, or Zelda's at least.

(Asked to submit a recipe for a book, she sent them the following.)

"See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy".

To be a true flâneuse or if the case applies, a flâneur - means deciding that life is to be lived. It is seizing a moment to be witty instead of admitting you don't know how to cook*. Of course you know what one should serve, but you wouldn't serve it yourself because that would be unspeakable. (GASP!)

But choosing the life of the flâneuse, the bohemian, the vagabond, the layabout, the dandy, the fop, the eccentric - it's not for everybody and it's not always a pretty picture either.  Zelda was in many ways oppressed by her husband.  When she asked for a divorce because she was smitten with another man, F. Scott locked her in the house and didn't let her out again until she agreed to not divorce him. His work isolated a woman who wanted nothing more than to find a creative outlet for herself.  On top of everything Zelda grew increasingly resentful of all the things she'd written that found their way into her husband's work.

When she was approached to write a cheeky review of her husband's new book The Beautiful and The Damned, Zelda it seemed couldn't resist mentioning how her husband edited her words.

To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and, also, if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and, also, if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years ... It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

The review led to offers of work from other magazines, but in the end it was her husband who would be mentioned alongside Hemingway and the other greats of The Lost Generation that they had been a part of while living in France. Zelda would be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Their glamorous life was over. Their famous friends and wealthy admirers now considered them unpleasant company.

Zelda wrote her own book, Save Me the Waltz, in just six weeks and sent it off to the publisher.  When her husband finally read the book he was furious. It was Zelda's autobiography and whilst writing it she had dared to use parts of her life and their life together that Fitzgerald himself had already planned on using for his book Tender is the Night. 

In the end Zelda's book sold only a little over a thousand copies, less than half of the 3,010 books the publisher had printed because her husband would call her a plagarist (ha!) and a third-rate writer (insecure much?) and force her to revise it until it met his conditions. 

The same man who locked Zelda in the house so she couldn't leave him would leave her in a mental hospital while he went off to Hollywood to write for TV, and where because there may actually be poetic justice in the world he would die from drinking before her and without her.

Eight years later Zelda died while waiting for electroshock therapy as the mental hospital she was living in burned to the ground. She never finished her last book.
 

Their daughter Scottie had the last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on their headstone - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", but I prefer this line that was 100% Zelda's - "I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally."

* Some flâneuse-eur like myself do like to cook and consider cooking extremely decadent things a school of philosophic thought of its own. It's called yumology.

Read more >>

Ojingo Bokkum, Pan Fried Squid in Spicy Sauce 오징어볶음

I tend to cook a lot of Korean food not simply because Korean cuisine is my heritage, but because I love the beautiful simplicity of a well-prepared Korean meal.

Last night I served ojingo bokkum (오징어볶음) (sauteed squid) with sukju namul muchim (숙주-나물)(green bean sprout salad), with marinated radish, mat kimchee, and seaweed.




Ojingo Bokkum

Korean cuisine is a complicated thing. How many side dishes (called banchan) to serve, how many different dishes, soups, etc. Then once the food is made there are rules about place settings, where the hot foods are placed, where the cold foods are placed, who eats when, and even where you're supposed to place the kimchee!

Don't think of Korean cooking as it is in restaurants or else you will torture yourself. When I cook Korean at home for just myself and a few people, I rarely ever make what is known as "haejeongsikk", or a full course meal. When I cook for less than 6 people I usually make one banchan or side dish for each person and unless I'm serving BBQ (bulgogi, daegi gogi, kalbi, sam gyeop sal) I try to make one main dish for two people.





Hanjeongsik - I count 17 side dishes, 1 main dish, 1 soup, rice, and 3 sauces!

Read more >>