Mellow Yellow

When I was growing up, the most exotic dish my mother served was chicken curry. This was in the ‘70s long before Thai restaurants popped up on neighbourhood corners or magazines offered step-by-step instructions for grinding your own curry spice blends at home.

Mom made her chicken curry with big spoonfuls of Sharwood’s mild curry powder and lots of cream and served it with up with Uncle Ben’s white rice and a half dozen or so condiments that included bottled Major Grey chutney, chopped almonds, cashews, shredded coconut, juicy mandarin orange segments and plump slices of banana. My job was to help set these out in little bowls in the middle of the kitchen table in an uncommon configuration that I thought gave our dinner a festive air.

On curry nights, what I looked forward to most, maybe even more than the meal itself, was the story my parents dished up alongside it for us kids. I don’t remember the first time they told it but it became a ritual to ask them, between big saffron-hued spoonfuls of chicken and rice, “Tell us the story about this curry?”

On cue, they’d recount the narrative of their courtship. The place was the Bahamas. The time: the tense few weeks in October 1962 that would become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In those days, my mom was an Air Canada stewardess (this being the more carefree pre-“flight attendant”, pre-terrorist era of air travel). My dad was an equally carefree British engineer working in Nassau. The drama playing out in Cuba a few hundred kilometres away grounded my mom and her fellow crew members. While the world waited with baited breath on the brink of nuclear war, my mom and dad did what any respectable young jetsetters in the 60s would do. They partied. Of course, my parents didn’t use those exact words when recounting events for us kids. Their version was far more romantic.

Mom met dad one night in a crush of guests at the home of British racecar driver Sterling Moss. Dad took mom out to dinner at the posh restaurant the next night where the meal turned out to be unpalatable. The waiter gave them a tip on a more authentic local eatery. They left and ended up in a place called the Rum Keg Room with a delicious plate of chicken curry in front of them. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Mom always maintained that her “Cuban Crisis” curry, as we came to call it, was a re-creation of the dish she and my dad shared that night and, over the years, the narrative seldom wavered. Whether the details were true or not, in the constant re-telling, the story became fact -- a permanent part of our family history.

It was only years later that I realized my childhood curry reflected culinary influences that had more to do with England than the Caribbean.

The word “curry” is thought to be a loose English translation of the Tamil word kari, meaning spiced sauce or gravy. When the British colonized southern India in the 17th century, they were seduced by the exotic cuisine but didn’t immediately grasp the subtle differences in the spice blends that Indian cooks used to create different dishes. Curry quickly became the default term for all the fiery sauce-based dishes the British tasted regardless of the variations in spices, seeds and herbs they contained.

As Britain’s interest in India grew, so did the British fondness for Indian food. By the late 1700s, the English had begun to produce the pre-mixed, pre-ground curry spice powders for commercial sale that remain popular today despite the recent interest among some home cooks in grinding spice blends from scratch.

The British love of curry is now more than 400 years old but much of what is now served up all over the UK bears little resemblance to the intense, complex dishes the Brits first tried on the Indian sub-continent centuries ago. Like love, it was inevitable that over time curry would evolve into something milder and more familiar to the British palate.

I don't doubt my parents' account of their curry dinner in Nassau but I realize now that the beloved family recipe it inspired was more likely born in the southwestern London suburbs where my mom and dad lived as newlyweds.

Despite the intensity of its name, Cuban Crisis Curry is an offspring of that long-ago marriage between Indian cuisine and British tastes – a mellow yellow reminder of an exciting first encounter.

Cuban Crisis Curry

2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 lbs skinned, de-boned chicken breast cut into 1-inch cubes
2-3 Tbsp flour
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger (or 1/8 tsp. ground)
2 stalks celery, diced
2 carrots, diced (optional)
1 red or green pepper, diced (optional)
1 to 1 ½ cups chicken stock
2-3 Tbsp mild or medium curry powder
½ to ¾ cup whipping cream

Coat chicken cubes with flour, and shake off excess. Heat oil in a large pot or skillet over medium heat. Add chicken and sauté until golden. Add onion, garlic, ginger and celery (and carrots and peppers if using) and cook until vegetables are tender. Add curry powder, stir in and cook one minute longer. Add chicken stock. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 10-15 minutes until chicken is tender and cooked through. Stir in cream and heat through. Serve hot over white basmati rice (Uncle Ben’s Converted White Rice if you really want to go old school) with condiments on the side.

Condiments

Shredded coconut
Cashews
Slivered almonds
Tinned mandarin orange segments
Sliced banana
Chopped green onions
Chopped parsley or cilantro
Mango chutney or major grey chutney
Crystallized ginger
Sultanas/raisins
Chopped tomato

Condimontage

Here’s a kitchen tool for you, Mrs. Robinson

In one of the more memorable scenes from the movie The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, the Dustin Hoffman character, gets some unwanted career advice from a friend of his parents. "I just want to say one word to you,” says Mr. Maguire, his arm firmly around Benjamin, “Plastics.”

That now famous film line, uttered for the first time back in 1967, reverberated with audiences who understood that “plastics” symbolized everything that was wrong with America’s suburban middle-class values and aspirations – the materialism, the phoniness, the conformity, the budding obsession with consuming for consumption’s sake. I was only two when The Graduate was released but I can appreciate the irony of that line given how little the middle-class quest to conform and consume seems to have changed over the years – especially in the kitchen.

Plastics came to mind as I sat through my first “pampered chef” party the other night. The Pampered Chef is the somewhat evangelical offspring of that iconic revolutionary, Tupperware. Founded by suburban American homemaker and entrepreneur Doris Christopher, the Pampered Chef empire uses an army of homemakers to sell hundreds of kitchen tools made of, you guessed it, plastic -- not to mention many other groovy materials Mr. Maguire couldn’t have even imagined back in the swingin’ 60s.

These products, claims Cunningham, make cooking easier and faster. Her mantra is: time wasted fixing meals is time that could be better spent with your husband and kids and, apparently, this can’t be achieved without the help of a dizzying array of cookware, cutlery and other culinary devices like the Mix ‘N Masher, Apple Wedger, Pie Gate and Hold & Slice – the last one bearing a disturbing resemblance to an afro pick.

My sister and I were the only single women at the party held deep in northwestern suburbs of city. Almost all the other guests were stay-at-home moms – some well-educated, some older, all nice, friendly women. It was a Friday night and not a cocktail in sight. The Pampered Chef is all about good, clean cooking. Mrs. Robinson, the original desperate housewife, would have hated this, I thought, like she would have loathed the Tupperware parties of her time. She would have opted for a cigarette over a spoon any day. And I imagine she was partial to more risqué gadgets -- the kind usually found in bedside drawers, not kitchens.

The soft sales pitch began when the hostess asked each guest to choose a piece of kitchen equipment to try out. The plan was for the guests to prepare an aloha chicken pizza and cherry chocolate skillet cake together at the kitchen table. My job was to chop a red pepper. Right away, I saw that my gadget, a maraca-shaped food chopper that I quickly dubbed the Bang & Chop, was a complete waste of good plastic.

As the party hostess demo'd it for me, she said, “You just need to push down on it harder. Just bang it down a few times to get everything chopped up nicely.” She’d already employed a mini-scoop to de-seed the pepper, a knife to cut it into pieces small enough for the Bang & Chop to accommodate, and some weird flattened scoops to transfer the pepper pieces to a nearby bowl.

“Don’t you see?” I wanted to yell at the other guests. “With one good sharp knife, we could have had this diced in half the time it’s taken us to produce this sloppy mess of red shards.”

“And the best thing about this,” added the hostess, while breaking the B&C down into its fussy individual metal and plastic parts. “Is that it can be dismantled and put in the dishwasher.” So, in addition to the trauma of maiming a perfectly innocent red pepper, my environmental antenna sprung to life!

As the evening progressed through displays of collapsible mixing bowls, metal egg separators and garlic presses – all dishwasher-safe! -- the presenter enthusiastically pointed out that many of the tools are designed so you never have to touch the food you’re preparing. Since I’ve never understood people’s aversion to touching food they are perfectly happy to put in their mouths, the whole thing struck me as slightly repressed.

Of course, the target consumer for these devices are moms with tots. Being single and childless, I don’t know what it’s like to fix dinner with a snotty, crying child hanging off my leg. But I don’t buy the sales pitch that the solution to getting food on the table quickly is to arm yourself with lots of kitchen gadgets. Wouldn’t be easier and better for the environment – not to mention the soul – to stay focused on the food, not the tools?

My grandmother, now 94 and the original comfort food queen, will tell you the simplest, most satisfying dishes are prepared with a few good ingredients and even less equipment. Her signature dish of macaroni and cheese requires only seven ingredients (and that includes the salt and pepper) and five kitchen tools. She still makes it for her family and it beats aloha chicken pizza any day.

Back at the Pampered Chef party, the pizza and cake were ready to eat and everyone had moved to the living room to fill out their order forms. As I eavesdropped on discussions about high-tech spatulas and whisks, I thought not much has changed since ’67. There will always be stay-at-home moms in suburban kitchens spending their husbands’ pay cheques on the latest in needless cookware. These people will always be more interested in “stuff” than in the actual food they are preparing.

But, luckily, there will always be people like me, too. We are disillusioned, alienated gastronomic Benjamin Braddocks. We aren’t interested in being pampered. And while we may never triumph over the $700M Pampered Chef empire and its ilk, we will always want our food to be real, the preparation authentic. We’ll always want more flavour, basic, good-quality tools, fewer gadgets, less plastic.

Kabocha mon amour

Marcel Proust famously wrote, in Remembrance of Things Past, “I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”

So it was, on rare excursion to the Great Canadian Superstore last week, I came across a bin of kabocha squash and, to my great surprise, memories of my life 20 years ago as an ESL teacher in rural Japan came tumbling out right there in the crowded produce section on a Saturday morning in early spring.

I’m not sure the great French author had vegetables in mind when he penned his renowned passage. He was particularly fixated on a certain madeleine at the time. He definitely was not thinking about a knobby, squat green Japanese squash but, for me, kabocha resurrects my Japanese life in a way that ubiquitous foods like sushi just can’t.

Japan was where I had my culinary awakening of sorts. Its food, like its culture, was completely unfamiliar and mysterious. Like the Celts, the people on small island where I lived were completely on board with the idea of souls being held captive in natural or inanimate objects. The only difference was they believed it was the souls of living people, if badly shaken or shocked in things like car accidents, that ran away into nearby rocks and trees where they could only be coaxed back into the body with a little help from a local priestess.

Kabocha, for me, conjures up chilly winter nights at home under the comfy kotatsu sipping tea and eating tender sweet squash that had been gently simmered in a therapeutic broth of fish stock, soy sauce, sugar and salt. I also have fond memories of downing it deep-fried in tempura batter, along with copious pints of Orion beer, in the company of good friends in noisy Izakaya pubs, and also coming home from work to the family I stayed with, where my Japanese “mom” would cook a rich chicken and kabocha stir-fry using produce and poultry fresh from her family’s farm, served proudly with steaming bowls of glistening white rice straight off the black market. Only the best for her family - and the foreigner!

I still remember the first time I saw a kabocha. It was for sale on a bench outside the corner store down the street from my apartment. I thought it was a pumpkin that hadn’t turned orange. I brought it home and carved it into a jack-o-lantern. In the spirit of international exchange, some of the other foreign teachers and I were throwing a Halloween party for our Japanese colleagues and, as everyone knows, you can’t properly celebrate Halloween without Jack. I hated that it wasn’t orange. I wanted everything to be so authentic.

When my Japanese guests arrived and a saw the kabocha hacked-up and grinning maniacally on the buffet table, they all giggled, hands over their mouths, curious and scandalized at the same time which made me feel like I’d committed some cross-cultural gaffe. Turns out my offence was more culinary in nature. My colleagues couldn’t believe I’d thrown the “meat” out because a kabocha, unlike the pumpkins we typically seek out for October 31, are a delicious, versatile veggie that I eventually learned, with help from my Japanese friends, to prepare, skin and all, many different ways.

Kabochas aren’t pretty. Nor do they grow to the impressive planet-like dimensions of their orange-hued cousins. But what they lack in looks, they make up for in flavour and texture. Kabochas have a smooth, sweet, nutty taste and a moist, fluffy consistency – a bit like chestnuts or sweet potato – when cooked. And when you cut one open, the deep tangerine-coloured meat is an unexpectedly intense surprise.

After cooking – and eating – kabocha in Japan for many years, when I got back to Canada in the mid-1990s, I was disappointed not to find it in produce sections on this side of the Pacific. I would sometimes come across it – like an old flame -- in one of Vancouver’s many small Asian grocery stores but our meetings were few and far between. Then, when I moved to the culinary hinterlands of Calgary, I pretty much gave up hope of ever cooking with kabocha again until last week when I stumbled across them in the bin at the Great Canadian Superstore.

I left the Superstore with one perfect, small squash in hand, transported back to an earlier time and trying to remember the many kabocha recipes I’d learned almost two decades ago.

Given that I hadn’t cooked with kabocha in years, I felt a celebration was in order. But I also felt that simply using the kabocha to re-create remembrances of things past would feel too stale. I decided to use my long lost love as the filling base for gyoza dumplings, another classic Japanese treat I learned to make when I lived there. Gyoza are usually packed with a heady mixture of pork, onions and garlic but, thinking back to my first kabocha, Jack, and the horrified reaction it got from my colleagues, I thought I’d honour the memory of that party with a big party-worthy batch of kabocha gyoza served with an east-west fusion-type ginger-balsamic vinegar dipping sauce. I can hear my former colleagues giggling nervously now. I think they'd be scandalized and thrilled at the same time, not to mention impressed by how much I’ve remembered -- and grown -- since that time.

Kabocha Gyoza
(makes approximately 30-50 gyozas)

3 lb kabocha squash

1 Tablespoon flaxseed oil
1/2 cup walnuts or pecans or chestnuts, finely chopped (optional)
1 teaspoon ground sage

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pepper

Pre-made gyoza wrappers *

1 – 1 ½ Tablespoons olive oil

*You can find pre-prepared wrappers in most Asian supermarkets and in some regular supermarkets in bigger cities. In a pinch, you can also use wonton wrappers.

For the gyoza, preheat the oven to 400F (200C). To prepare the kabocha, cut it in quarters and remove the seeds. On a non-stick or foil-lined baking tray or roasting pan, bake the squash, cut side down for approximately 20 – 30 minutes or until the skin is tender. Remove kabocha from oven to cool.

When the kabocha is cool enough to handle, peel the skin off the squash meat and discard. Put the meat in a large bowl and mash it well. Add the flaxseed oil, sage, salt and pepper and nuts if using. Mix well.To assemble the gyoza, spoon 1 teaspoon of kabocha mixture into each gyoza wrapper, and fold up to form a half moon shape. Seal the wrapper with a 4-5 folds along the edge to form a shell-like pattern (this takes practice!)

To steam-fry the gyoza (the traditional preparation method), heat a nonstick pan (with a lid) over medium high heat. Add olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. When the oil is hot, put in enough gyoza to cover the bottom of the pan (they should touch each other but not overlap). Add approximately ½ a cup of water (The water should cover the bottom of the pan). Cover the pan tightly with the lid and cook until liquid has evaporated and bottoms of dumplings are crisp and golden on the bottom but slippery, smooth on top, about 7 to 10 minutes. Add 2 tablespoons more water if pan dries out before bottoms are browned. Remove lid and cook about 1 minute more, shaking skillet to loosen the gyozas. You can freeze uncooked dumplings to use later.

Ginger-Balsamic Vinegar Dipping Sauce

1 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar

3 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1-inch piece ginger, minced

½ to 1 Tbsp truffle oil (optional)

1-3 tablespoons water (optional)

In a small bowl, mix soy sauce, sugar, vinegar and ginger together, add truffle oil if using and water if mixture seems too thick or tastes too salty. You can also prepare this by zapping it in the microwave until the mixture boils. If you prepare it this way, leave the ginger in slices and strain these out, after zapping, and before serving.

The Big Cheese, Bra, Italy

Cook a man a fish. . .

For lunch today, I poked my head into the fridge and brought out some poached salmon, a few cooked potatoes, olives, tomatoes, a stalk of celery, half a red onion and a wee Japanese cucumber. While mulling over what to do with all these lovely ingredients, I was reminded of the old Chinese proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

As someone who has enjoyed cooking -- and eating -- for most of my life, that proverb has become a kind of Zen koan to me, at least when I think about it in the culinary sense.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Hmm. Notice how the proverb doesn't specify how the fish was presented. Was it lightly battered, fried and served up with a big side of fries and tartar sauce? Or bathed in a silky rich sauce of lemon, butter and almonds? Grilled over an open-air fire on cedarwood? Devoured, raw, atop a sticky, sweet mound of white rice?

Now before writing me off as some wingnut alone in the kitchen with too many sharp, pointy knives, as far as I'm concerned, until you know exactly how the fish was prepared, it's hard to imagine that giving a man a fish, so to speak, is a bad thing.

One of my great joys is cooking fish, not to mention just about anything else, for other people. At the same time, there's nothing quite so enjoyable as eating something that someone else has made for me, especially if it has been done with skill, thoughtfulness and love. I guess that means I want to be given my fish and taught how to make it, too.

See what I mean? If you can figure out this culinary koan, let me know. In the meantime, back to the beautiful little Japanese cuke. How did I ever survive before these appeared in Canadian produce sections? Those monster English cukes are always too long to fit in the veggie drawer and usually start to go mushy at one end while I work my way through one over the course of a week. Japanese cucumbers, on the other hand, are perfect miniatures of their Anglo cousins and just the right size for snacking on or throwing into a salad.But enough about the mini-cuke.

Today, at least, it didn't take me long to decide what I was going to do with the proverbial fish. In this case salmon. I realized I had everything in front of me to make a Salade Nicoise - except the tuna or the anchovies, or the green beans or eggs. Oh, and I was out of fresh basil or green pepper, too. Is a Salade Nicoise really a Salade Nicoise if you don't have all the required ingredients on hand? That sounds like another Zen puzzler, but I like to think of it as an opportunity.

It's precisely when you have to improvise that cooking starts to get interesting and fun. So, ta-da! Today, cooking for myself and nobody else, I created a dish that I like to call Salade BC-coise. The BC, of course, is a nod to the West Coast and all the yummy salmon that comes from there. I made enough to keep myself fed for at least two days!

Salade BC-coise
Serves 1-2 people

For the salad:
6 grape tomatoes, cut in half
1 mini cucumber, diced
1 medium celery stalk, diced
2 Tbsp. red onion, finely diced
6-8 black olives
4-6 oz. poached wild salmon
2-4 baby potatoes, cooked and quartered
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 tsp. fresh-dried basil (or 1 Tbsp fresh basil, chopped)
Lettuce

For the vinaigrette:
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper

For the salad, in a large bowl, mix together all the ingredients except the parsley and lettuce.

For the vinaigrette: in a small bowl, combine the vinegar, salt and fresh ground pepper. Gradually add in the olive oil, whisking to emulsify.

To assemble the salad, add the vinaigrette to the salmon & veggie mixture. Add parsley and basil and toss everything to combine. Serve on top of the lettuce.