Category: Dinner

When it’s Friday night and you’re too tired to cook, the guys at Carnivore Oak Park have you covered. Crusty bread with their homemade ramp butter? Addictive!

Yesterday was another day of reclaiming leftover tandoori chicken. Makes enough for 4-6; this is something we end up doing about once a month.

1. Set water boiling for pasta.

2. While pasta water is coming to a rolling boil, strip chicken off the bone.

3. Add pasta to water, set a timer.

4. In a large pan, sauté chicken in a little oil or ghee with the onions that came with the chicken.

5. Deglaze the fond with whatever random wine you have open.

6. Add some cream (about 1/2 – 1 c.) and simmer it in.

7. When the timer goes off, drain pasta and add to chicken in pan.

8. Chop a little cilantro from the garden if you like, and stir it in.

Kavi was making herself spicy ramen noodles from a packet yesterday, and I asked if she could make me some too. As she was waiting the 4.5 minutes for the noodles to cook, she said:

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to cook an entire dinner. I get so impatient just waiting for this!”

Heh. I remember those feels, kiddo. College cafeteria food was what finally drove me to learn — we’ll see how it goes for her.

In the meantime, this was a lovely dinner cooked for me by my daughter on a day when I was tired from travel and had absolutely no inclination to cook myself. Spicy!

So here’s my plan to convince Kavi to start making me salads — first I will start making fabulous salads, and then she’ll decide to make them, and I will lounge on the couch.

Tonight’s salad from the cookbook Mixt: grilled chicken and asparagus, roasted fingerling potatoes, cherry tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, shaved Parmesan, champagne-shallot-Dijon vinaigrette, local lettuce.

Kavi: Usually I eat the worst thing on the plate first, but I couldn’t pick anything, because it was all delicious!

My cunning plan is well set in motion!

Watching Bridgerton this morning — caught up on episode one of the second season, about to watch episode two. Am quite enjoying the Sharma women — they’re both delightful so far. I want to be friends with Kate!

Few pics from the last coule of days — progress on a fingerless mitt, although I’ve now reached the point where I have to stop and watch a YouTube video to remind me how to do the thumb gusset, as the instructions are confusing me. I’ve done this once before, but it was many years ago, and I have absolutely no recollection of how it goes.

Made two different chicken curry dishes recently. The first was sort of an improvised combination of my ginger-garlic chicken & a sothi — I used the seasonings for ginger-garlic chicken, which my kids love, added potatoes, and simmered it all in a can of coconut milk, adding some frozen peas at the end. Anand can’t handle spicy heat, so this one was designed to be no spice yet still yummy — it worked well, though Kavi and I were both happy to have some spicy pol (coconut) sambol to eat with it.

Sri Lankan food adapts pretty easily to being vegan or gluten-free, but I have to say, if you’re allergic to coconut, you’re going to have to modify a lot of our recipes. It can be done, certainly — you can use cow milk or soy milk, etc. I had a roommate (hi, Cliff) who was allergic to coconut, and I made curries for him. But coconuts really are central to our cuisine…

Last night, I made a classic chicken curry — this is one of the first Sri Lankan dishes I learned to make and is eaten across the island — you can find it in most restaurants, I think. One change I habitually make to accommodate my family is that I use chicken thighs on the bone, but take a few minutes to cut most of the meat off the bone before cooking.

That means Kevin and Kavi, who eat their rice and curry with a fork, can easily manage, but the curry sauce still has all the richness and flavor you get from simmering the bones. And since I eat rice and curry with my hand, I don’t work hard to get all the meat off — I leave a good bit on, and I’m happy to eat those bones with a bit of meat for my meal. Yum yum. My mom likes to crack the bones with her teeth and suck out any remaining marrow; I don’t usually do that myself, but every once in a while…

The last pic is just some sketches Kavi did. Her hands are amazing to me.

Came home, ate leftovers, finished off the pol sambol, so I had to make a new batch, of course. A double batch, in fact, so I could freeze half of it.

Cayenne and salt and lime and onion and coconut. Yum.