Cooking On Sundays

Before we start on today’s recipe, we have a special surprise.  See, in the past, I tell people bring a bottle of wine, because while I can feed everyone for not too much money, I can’t bring enough wine to make sure everyone is happy.  It was difficult to get people to do this, but suddenly, everyone was bringing wine, and last week I had two half-full bottles of wine at the end (as well as three unopened bottles!).  So what does one do with several bottles of wine sitting around in the fridge for a week?

• Two oranges
• One lemon
• One grapefruit
• One tangelo
• A bottle of “cranberry juice cocktail” (sugar, cranberry juice, color, etc, what else goes in that?)
• All the leftover wine, which was the two leftover bottles of red wine, and the remainder of a boxed pink wine

Sangria!  Made the house sticky, but it was worth it!

This week was one of those days which I had no idea what I was doing, until someone said “you can make anything into curry!”, which I guess I have that talent.  So let me try to remember what went into the curry:

• Garlic
• Two poblano peppers
• Four thai peppers
• A block of firm tofu
• Frozen little shrimps
• A huge cauliflower.  It cost a dollar.
• A portobello mushroom cap
• Turmeric
• Red curry paste (it was the only one at the store I found that seemed to have real ingredients)
• A can of coconut milk
• Some scallions (I had them, I wanted them used)

I’m sure there was other stuff too but you’ll have to wait until I remember.  I sliced the garlic and peppers first, threw them in.  There was a lot of poblano in there, but I threw the tofu in there next anyway, but this meant it didn’t really get fried which is how I prefer it.  I coated this mixture with the turmeric but I think it may have been too little for everything in the end.  I let it cook, try to cook the tofu more than the rest, and when the tofu was either yellow via cooking or yellow via being coated by turmeric, I put in the can of coconut milk.  I added to this the curry paste and stirred.  Then I threw every thing else in.

Just a warning about the shrimps, if you attempt to do this yourself.  I got a huge bag of frozen “cocktail” shrimps, the little kind (about an inch or two long).  When I threw them in the curry (and threw is a good word to describe it), they made the curry smell distinctly shrimpy, but, themselves, shrank down to very tininess, and suddenly it wasn’t entirely fair to call it shrimp curry anymore.  Suddenly it was far more cauliflower curry.

I also made a spinach salad.  This got a little fancy, but cheese was on sale, so I went all out.

• Spinach (I normally buy bunch spinach, I bought a tub of “baby” spinach this time…  bunches are better, but I think baby spinach works better in this case)
• Brie
• Dried sweetened cranberries
• Chopped walnuts
• Clover sprouts
• Olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Easy!  Fancier than I’m used to.  I actually didn’t make the salad–I just handed all the ingredients to my lovely assistant and when I got around to paying attention, there was salad!  She also made the sangria!  Fabulous!  I should try cooking by this method more often.

One of the nice things about being out of town is I don’t have to worry about the local allergens.  One of not so nice things is figuring what everyone else is allergic to!

Anyway, today’s recipe involves milk, and a lot of it.  We only made soup and a simple salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers, with some dressing found in the fridge, very easy), and I’m only going to write about the soup.

The original recipe was found in “The Joy of Cooking”, I can’t remember what page, and an edition from about 1990ish.  Again with the lack of pictures, we were too busy drinking wine and talking about things that happened a long long long time ago rather than looking for cameras.  The original recipe was spicy corn chowder, with Raven’s suggestion (and actually she did much of the cooking) we turned it into corn chowder with curried shrimps.

The ingredient list looked something like this:

• About 3/4 a liter of milk
• Three bags of frozen corn
• Lots of paprika, red cayenne powder, yellow curry powder, turmeric, salt, and pepper
• One green and one red bell pepper
• One poblano
• Two unidentified anaheim-ish peppers
• A few potatoes
• Some butter
• Garlic and onions
• Small precooked shrimps
• Enough oil to saute shrimps

We precooked the potatoes by boiling them.  The garlic, onions, and peppers were sauteed in the soup pot with butter, and when done, put in the milk and potatoes.  As we argued about whether it was soup or hot milk, we put in the the other ingredients except the shrimp, and kept adding various spices, in the hope that some of them would turn it into soup, while keeping it on the heat all the time, boiling it down somewhat.  As it approached a more “soup” quality than “hot milk” quality, Raven sauteed the shrimps, without using oil or butter, in yellow curry powder, and then tossed them in.  Comparatively easy!

This fed seven people, one of which showed up three hours after the rest of us ate.  The soup was well received–people who were looking at it suspiciously as we started later went for seconds, and the poor guy who showed up late was lucky to get the last bowl, as we were all threatening to eat it.

The only thing I would do different is add something to the milk for a more substantial base–while cooking potatoes, spices, and other stuff into the milk does give it some substance, next time I would blend potatoes, or possibly some bread, into the broth.  I found a stale baguette and hacked into pieces and let it soak in my bowl–I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I love bread, and it was delicious.