Lately we have been experimenting with Thai and Indian cooking at home. The allure of Yellow Thai Curry and Chana Masala made in our own kitchen has slowly transformed from a dream to a reality.
Starting from scratch
Neither of us really knew how to cook when we moved to China. Chelsey could bake, but our apartment does not have an oven-ovens are uncommon in China. I could cook loads of pasta dishes, but little else. The abundant, affordable, and delicious taco trucks in Austin made it un-compelling to cook at home the last 6+ years.
Moving here, we were faced with the opportunity to amortize the cost of cooking since there were now two mouths to feed, and zero taco trucks. We had the additional constraint of Chelsey’s dietary restrictions: she is vegetarian and gluten-free, and gets sick from onions and maybe garlic. In the Venn-diagram of eligible foods, Chelsey occupies an almost vanishing subspace populated by legumes, rice, vegetables, corn tortillas, macaroons, and Malbec wine. This diet is not easy to accommodate in most restaurants in the US, much less a nation where you do not speak or read the language. So the incentive for cooking was heightened: it is easier to control what we eat at home than at a restaurant.
(As an aside, I would like to address vegetarianism. Chelsey has been a vegetarian since she was 17. Many of my favorite people are vegetarians or vegan, and Chelsey and I met when she lived at a vegan Co-op house in Austin. I am convinced that history will look back on the practice of eating meat as wrong. I predict most folks will not eat meat within several generations from now. Despite all of that, I am not strictly vegetarian. I have reduced meat from my diet, in part because of Chelsey. I view her influence as a virtue of our relationship, not a compromise.)
Luckily, the small Venn-diagram of eligible ingredients are abundant in two of our favorite cuisines: Indian food and Thai food. Indian and Thai are just the best. Who doesn’t love Chana Masala, Vegetable Korma, Aloo Gobhi, or Thai Curries? And their ingredients are primarily legumes, vegetables, spices, oil, coconut milk, and rice.
Thai Curries
We started out making Thai food. It was like a nervous first date when I tried to make a Thai Green Curry for the first time. I took a leap of faith on a curry paste, and the Internet informed me that I basically just needed to add coconut milk and vegetables and we’d be all set. We were shocked when our first Thai Green Curry turned out so edible! It was spicier than we expected, which is a good thing– we didn’t want some tame imitation crap. We laughed, as if we had hit the lottery. Here’s a delicious quick meal we both like that either of us can cook. The French Market near our home has the two main ingredients for the curry (coconut milk and curry paste), and the numerous veggie markets have everything else.
Over the next month we ate Thai curries a few nights a week. We gladly experimented with every permutation of curry and veggie mix. Green is the spiciest, yellow is Chelsey’s favorite. Red is good all around. We experimented with carrots, potato, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, five different mushrooms, snap peas, etc. One of our favorite additions was adding raisins and cashews. The main lessons we learned in the beginning were to add the broccoli and cauliflower very late in the cooking process. Those two are best cooked firm. The other lesson learned quickly was to cut the potatoes into relatively large pieces and cook them in the curry from the beginning. This provides the right balance of soft but not thickening the curry too much. Mushroom and eggplant can also go in at the start.
The setting
A big part of enjoying a meal at home or at a restaurant is the environment. As much as we would like to think that we judge a dish objectively, the surroundings affect our mood and our expectations. So we actively improved our dining area with a few key upgrades.
When we first moved into the apartment there was an empty, dust-filled display case/fine china cabinet. We cleaned it out thoroughly and filled it with some real wine glasses- the long stem thin walled types that are hard to bring home in a backpack on a scooter. Amazingly, the shoddily-wired china cabinet lighting system didn’t explode when I plugged it in. (Update- the lighting system has since exploded.) Lofted adjacent to our small dining table stands this brilliant display case. We turn the light on for dinner. The wine glasses stand on the top shelf, redirecting glints of dispersed halogen light in every which way. The wine bottles below cast imposing shadows against the cabinet sidewalls. The base shelf is made of wood and holds the 5 books we brought with us, and a copy of my PhD thesis. The books reflect our personalities: “Python Cookbook”, “The Out of Sync Child”, “Docker Up and Running”, “China”, “Cosmicomics”. We both like Cosmicomics.
There’s a huge map of China, above our dinner table. It’s all in Chinese, as if to further emphasize we are in a foreign place. But we hand-labeled all the countries and provinces in English. We often move our eyes over the boundaries of the provinces and point out the similarities to the shape of the state borders of the continental USA. Yunnan is Texas. Guangdong is Florida, I guess making Hainan Cuba, which doesn’t make sense. Hong Kong is either Miami or Savannah or Disney World. Shanghai is New York City, and Beijing is Boston. The analogy fails with nearby Korea. The large China map is helping us plan trips around Southeast Asia, which is at eye level with us while we enjoy our Thai Curries. Thailand is naturally a premier destination.
Occasionally we pluck the glasses from the case and fill them with a red wine. When we first started opening the wines Chelsey found that some were ruined- dried out corks suggested that they might have been stored in extreme temperatures. We found that the newer, cheaper, bottles were the best- they had less time to be sitting around on the shelf. We now stock up from a nearby wholesale wine distributor, Cheers, which happens to be where I take swing dance classes on Thursday nights.
Beyond Thai
After a couple months peppered with Thai curries we had exhausted the permutations of veggies and the curry pastes. We decided the next step was to start cooking Indian food at home. But naturally, we would need to do some very important research at local Indian restaurants, sampling their cuisines to take notes. The photo at the top of this post is actually from the Sanlitun location of Indian Kitchen, one of our favorite restaurants here in Beijing. Ask us about the ridiculous story that happened moments after this photo was taken.
In the a future post we will describe our voracious entry into home Indian cooking, explain how it was catalyzed, and show examples of the tasty outcomes.