Planning Ahead for Mulligatawny Stew
No, that is not a picture of mulligatawny stew. You don’t need to adjust your glasses or your screen. Oho! Is that some snark I spy? Am I becoming irrelevant? I’m offended. :C (I am learning from the best.~Terri)
As Rei and I were thinking about dinner for last night (Sunday night), I brought up the idea of mulligatawny stew. Zeke and I last had it about 20 years ago at some friends’ in San Francisco. Marci gave us the recipe and I am pretty sure we’ve never made it. It looked easy with a different flavor profile so I thought we’d give it a shot. I had never had mulligatawny stew before and I’m not sure I’m super keen on trying it again. (Same.~Terri)
But, we needed chicken and rice for the recipe and didn’t have either. The stew also needed 8 cups of chicken stock which would use up most of what we made the previous Sunday.
Sunday dinner became chicken, rice, carrots, and chickpeas (but with a twist).
I thought it would be fun to make Persian rice a la Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat). And if we were going with Persian rice, then we needed other Persian side dishes. I found a carrot, onion and date dish that looked really simple. And then I stumbled onto a crispy chickpea recipe. And our menu was set. I was not involved in this process, but I’m chill with just cooking. It’s nice :) (Rei, you need to step up in the idea area.~Terri)
We started with the mulligatawny stew base of carrots, onions, and celery (your standard mirepoix). Rei had chopping duty. I didn’t have to step away to clear my eyes when chopping the onions!
I sautéed in some oil as Rei continued to do the chopping for the Sunday night’s dinner.
Once sautéed lightly, I added some flour and curry powder. I was amazed by how quickly the powder soaked up the liquid. After a few minutes, I added 8 cups of chicken stock and set it aside to simmer until after dinner when we would add the leftover cooked rice and cubed chicken.
Rei cut carrots and sliced onions and dates and set aside until the chicken and rice were closer to being done. You can see the cheese in the background (I snacked a lot on the brie over there). It was a simple set up but not bad — we didn’t need a huge platter of hors d’oeuvres to tide us over.
We did our standard roast chicken. Sliced lemon in the cavity, some veggies on the bottom of the pot along with some herbs and olive oil. The chicken was set on three slices of bread (leftover sourdough this time). This went into the over at 425 degrees for about an hour. What did we put in the bottom? Carrots, onions, anything else? I don’t remember. Probably some herbs or something. (Might have had a shallot leftover from the fridge.~Terri)
I got 4 quarts of water on the stove to bring to a boil while I rinsed the basmati rice. This took about 4–5 rinses to get to clear water. I’ve never done this before and will most likely not do it again any time soon. I guess the reduced starch helps the dish. Didn’t really help ours which was a complete failure in both form and taste. Yeah, that was an interesting dish. And I’m also surprised you actually rinsed the rice; I would have just said ‘fuck it’ and tossed the rice in dry. (Every once in a while I try to follow directions.~Terri)
After cooking for about 7 minutes, I cooled the rice under cold water to stop the cooking.
The recipe called for removing 1 cup of the cooked rice and adding some plain yogurt to mix together as the base of the rice. Rei has been making yogurt each week along with their sourdough bread (more on this later). It’s RIDICULOUSLY easy. Seriously.
Meanwhile, Rei was working on the weekly sourdough bread. They’d started it earlier in the day and continued the 24 hour process steps while we were making Sunday and Monday nights’ dinners. It was a bit chaotic in the kitchen. I love working with bread dough…and it makes such tasty bread too!
The bread set on the counter as I continued with the next steps for the rice. The plan was to get the butter and oil hot, spread the yogurt/rice mixture on the bottom of the pan, pile on the rice, and then put holes in the rice.
It looked like it went according to plan.
For about 20 minutes, we rotated the pan every 4 minutes by a quarter turn to make sure the rice was cooking evenly. And then we set it on low to cook for another 20–25 minutes.
The final step is to courageously flip the pan over onto a platter or cutting board (I opted for the latter) and hope that the rice block comes away completely. This right here is a perfect example of the Schrodinger’s Cat problem: while the pan is flipped over, the rice is both on the board and still stuck to the pan. Or maybe only part of it fell out when you flipped it over and the rest is solidly adhering…
Nope. Not even close. I ended up putting it into a bowl. It was weird but ok with the carrots which were tasty tasty. Rei wouldn’t eat the rice (but Rei will be eating it tonight in the mulligatawny stew). I didn’t particularly care for the texture or flavor: too crunchy and weirdly bland.
As I was tortured by the rice, Rei was preparing the sourdough bread for the next step which was to round out and get into a floury bowl lined with a linen. Ideally, I would be putting those into bannetons (proving baskets), but I’ve gotten pretty good at working with what we have. I don’t think a major difference would present itself if I got bannetons. (Is that hint?~Terri)
Then these went into the fridge in a plastic bag. Weird. Well, the plastic bag was to prevent them from drying out overnight. I have a giant plastic turkey bag thing that I have dedicated to proving my bread because I am doing my best to reduce plastic usage, but haven’t found a good replacement. It’s worked out just fine so far. (Well, if you keep reusing it, then you are doing just fine.~Terri)
So if you are keeping track, we had the mulligatawny stew going (the big oval Le Creuset), the rice was in the cast iron pan, bread was on the counter, chicken is in the oven, and now we have two more pots/pans on the stove for the chickpeas and the carrots. The hob was pretty hectic that night. (Hob? When did you become British?~Terri)
Did I mention the chaos?
I took on the carrots while Rei did the chickpeas. Rei heated some oil and then put the drained and dried chickpeas into the pan for 15–20 minutes, shaking periodically to crisp them up. Once cooked, the chickpeas went onto a paper towel lined pan to remove the oil. They were super easy; it was basically that one chickpea recipe from Alison Roman’s Nothing Fancy, except without the shallot (or red onion, I’m not entirely sure).
Then Rei put them into a bowl and tossed with smoked paprika (my parents brought this back from Hungary on one of their random European trips) and cayenne pepper from Whole Foods. :) They were pretty spicy. Honestly, I didn’t particularly mind them. If you ate too many at once, yeah they were a bit much, but I liked the smoky, paprika-ey flavor they had going on.
The carrots, onions and dates when into a pan with some heated oil, cooked for a few minutes before I added a little water (100ml) and brought to a boil. Then I reduced the heat, covered, leaving a little steam vent, and let the water continue to cook off until we were ready to eat. Fun fact: Mom didn’t print or couldn’t find the end of the recipe, so we basically improvised and they turned out great! (Correction, I did print the recipe but the steps were cut off so we had to wing it. Judgmental much?~Terri)
As Rei cut the chicken, I put the cooked carrots on the bottom of the serving platter. I had the leftover carrots and some chicken for lunch today (Monday). Yum! Not sure why the chicken didn’t get more color, though. She looks a little anemic. Look at those gorgeous carrots and onions…I’m getting hungry just looking at them and remembering them — or maybe I was already hungry because I haven’t had dinner today yet…(Patience, young Jedi, patience.~Terri)
And that was dinner. Thumbs up for the chicken and the carrots. Thumbs down for the rice. And the chickpeas? They need to be part of a Chex mix kind of snack…kind of like wasabi peas.
After dinner, Rei and I ran to the grocery store to get some ice cream so we could eat it as we did a YouTube video on the cooking/eating experience. Zeke cleaned up the kitchen, added the chicken and rice to the stew, and got the stock pot going on the stove with some veggie scraps, leftover veggies, and the chicken carcass.
Rei got the Dutch ovens into the oven for the sourdough bread to bake this morning and preset the oven to pre-heat starting at 4:50 AM. No, I woke up at 4:50, so the pre heat started at 4 because I needed to have the Dutch ovens really frigging hot before I baked the bread.
Sunday dinner: check.
Monday dinner: check
Sourdough bread: check
Chicken stock: check
It was productive, if not chaotic, evening. We chatted about the chaotic cooking experience during a YouTube video that you can watch here. We are testing out the idea of doing some narrated cooking videos for #cookingwithrei.
Rei, I know you have homework and your snake is hungry and you need to edit the video but can you spare a few minutes to add your snarky goodness to this post? I have cocktail to make.
Okay, so I ended up getting to this on Wednesday (gasp! it’s been so long! however will we manage?!). The bread turned out wonderfully (one of the best loaves I’ve made yet) (I agree. ~Terri) and I have another set of dough on the way, almost ready to be baked tomorrow morning because apparently my friends want my bread? And are willing to buy it. (But are you paying us for the supplies we procured for you?~Terri)
So I guess I’m selling my bread now, which is super fun. Who would have thunk? (Did you get insurance for this? A business license? Did you set up an LLC?~Terri)
Anyways, as I mentioned above, I wasn’t a super big fan of the mulligatawny stew. I’ve found that the combination of rice and soups/stews isn’t really my jam (textures are real funky, dude), so I think I’m going to pass in the future. Plus, the flavor was altogether not super interesting. It wasn’t bad, but definitely not anything to write home about. (It was pretty boring.~Terri)
The carrot, date, and onion dish from Sunday was delicious, by the way. The dates lent it a bit of sweetness, and it still had that good old carroty, oniony charm that I could (and did) eat by the spoonful. No complaints here.
The roast chicken was our standard fare; a solid staple in any non-vegetarian/non-vegan household. Again, not complaining.
Thinking back on these two meals, the only thing I didn’t particularly care for was the stew. Oh, and the rice, I guess. The stew was nice on the cold winter’s night that was Monday. It was freezing all day, and I get cold super easily, so even with two borrowed jackets from friends who are too stubborn to take no for an answer when I tell them I’m fine (as my teeth are chattering with cold), I was still rather chilly. That hot stew with fresh bread from that morning was extremely welcome. (Didn’t I ask you if you needed more layers when you went to school?Hmmmm….~Terri)
Anyways, I should probably go and do some of my homework instead of procrastinating even more (this afternoon has not been super productive, oops), so I shall bring this to a close.
Until next time, ciao, and have an asdrenculitrix day!
Rei and Terri :D
