A week of meat

After a summer of semi-vegetarianism (which, in my household, means eating mostly veggies at home and meat at restaurants and dinner parties), and after eating a delicious stuffed pork tenderloin prepared by my friend Neville, and after learning that HEB now sells ground lamb in their regular meat section, I have declared this not-yet-autumnal last week of September, the week of meat! Allow me to share some photos.

The original inspiration for the week of meet. Neville's pork tenderloin stuffed with kale and pork sausage, wrapped in prosciutto and braised in a mixture of arak and apple cider, rosemary and fall apples. Phenomenal!

South Indian style eggplant curry

YouTube is a great source of information for cooks wishing to learn techniques from other culinary traditions. After Camellia Panjabi's eminently user-friendly curry primer, I learned a great majority of the Indian/South Asian techniques I know by watching Indian and Indian-American home cooks and professionals demonstrate their methods on video. Among other things, I learned how to make naan bread, homemade paneer, flaky paratha, and (my favorite) Idlis, all on YouTube. Some of the videos are poorly edited, cheesy, or just plain weird, while others are quite polished. But as long as you get a good visual sense for each step involved and the textures you're supposed to aim for at each stage of the process, as well as any special hand or tool techniques involved, a video is still more valuable, in my opinion, than any cookbook. For one, videos tend to demystify cooking techniques while cookbooks tend to do the opposite (an unintentional byproduct of the linguistic encoding, in precise terms, of techniques that are traditionally transmitted in the kitchen, mother to daughter, cook to cook, etc., where language only has an ancillary function). This is especially true with any recipe involving a yeast dough, where it is critical to observe textural factors such as wetness, gluten-level-stickyness, oiliness, etc.

Anyhow, YouTube cooking manifesto aside, I wanted to share a recipe from one of my favorite online Indian chefs, Sanjay Thumma. First, read this nice feature on Thumma that appeared in The Hindu two years ago, and which explains why YouTube is particularly useful for Indian cooking. Then, check out his video recipe for eggplant tomato curry. I looked specifically to Thumma when my garden started producing more eggplants and tomatoes than I knew what to do with, and was pleased with what I found. The inclusion of freshly roasted and crushed peanuts and sesame seeds in this particular recipe is what sold me.

Tomato curry with peri peri and kalonji

An improvised curry, marrying the citrusy burn of peri peri peppers with the inimitable fragrant-yet-bitter-nutty quality of kalonji seeds, made using a base of fresh garden tomatoes and local sweet onions.

I like to have a big jar of pre-made curry sauce in the fridge for those occasions when I'm not in the mood to cook. Throw half a bag of frozen peas and half a bag of frozen cubed potatoes into a pot with some pre-made curry, et voilà, a fresh batch of aloo mattar. Or use a bag of frozen mixed peas and carrots and I've got gajar mattar, and so on. If I have cooked meat or faux meat in the fridge, I might throw that in as well. One of the most memorable meals of the summer was leftover barbecue brisket from Franklin's (IMHO the best barbecue in Austin), chopped and warmed in a makhani masala that I had jarred a few days earlier. It was heaven on a plate I tell you.

Anyhow, I haven't made a curry in a few weeks mainly because I am out of Indian chiles. I used to have some reshampatti and gundu chiles in the pantry but they disappear quickly because my curries require megadoses. And since I haven't had time to shop at the Indian store in Austin, all I have at the moment is an assortment of Mexican chiles and some peri peris. The latter were introduced to me by a friend from Cape Town, who adds heat to his dishes using a deliciously smoky peri peri-infused whiskey. Just look how tiny and delicate they are but also take note of the heat level indicated on the bag, nine out of ten on Philippe de Vienne's heat scale:

Peri peri are singularly fruity and extremely spicy. I decided to base my curry on them. My second decision was to include kalonji (nigella sativa), which I thought would make a nice counterpoint to the peri peri with its inimitably fragrant-yet-bitter-nutty quality (imagine marrying a sesame seed, a caraway seed, and a shallot), so the curry recipe that follows is an improvisation on the marriage of peri peri and kalonji, made using a base of fresh garden tomatoes and local sweet onions. First, let me share a picture of the tomatoes. I just love their almost neon intensity.

Tomato curry (featuring peri peri and kalonji)
Heat a couple Tbsp of ghee in large sautee pan. Toast peri peri peppers and black mustard seeds lightly, then add fenugrek, cumin and coriander and toast for another 30 seconds or so. Next add chopped onions and slitted green chiles, sautee on medium heat until the onions become translucent and the chiles soften.