extreme cooking sports

About half the books are packed. Okay, I lie. A quarter of them? Anyway, we're grinding through the accumulation. We're moving from a place with tons of built-in storage: shelves, cabinets, cubbies, to a place that has almost none. So we've brutally culled as much as we, okay, Nola, can say goodbye to. I have no difficulty in waving bye-bye to boxes of magazines, however arty and marvelous, but Nola has more potential uses for such things than can be listed on a sheet of recycled notepaper. She has a lot of uses for that, too, of which making lists of uses for magazines is but scratching the surface.

Anyway, we've sent about 4' x 12' x 4' cubic of junk off on the junk truck, and the rest will just have to go with us. Meanwhile, I'm trying out curry recipes, since there's no longer a chance we'll be able to make it to our favourite curry restaurant any longer. This week, it's chicken vindaloo. Last week it was butter chicken, and aside from the explosions and the bleeding, it came out pretty well. Needs a bit more tomato, I think. I picked this recipe to try because it had a reasonable process for doing the tandoori, instead of glossing over that as though you could possibly still have butter chicken without it.

I expect to have a less exciting time, especially since if vindaloo explodes I could lose an eye. What happened last week started with me cutting my thumb while chopping up cilantro, and the sauce on the stove possibly got a bit warmer than it should while I was whining and staunching the bleeding and digging out bandaids and so forth, so that when I got to this part:

Reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat.

I left out the full stop between "Remove from heat" and this bit:

Transfer half the sauce to a blender and purée until smooth.

See, a comma won't do there. Punctuation matters in recipes, nearly as much as lists of ingredients.

So that with this rather hot liquid in the blender, when I punched the purée button the lid came off. Yes, I was holding it down. It came off anyway. The kitchen looked about what you'd expect when a blender full of tomato plus explodes up and outward.

So Nola cleaned that up while I hunted out another bandaid (they don't work well after soaking in pre-curry sauce) and it's a wonder the chicken going tandoori in the oven didn't burn, and that we had really quite a lot of sauce left, and neither of us was actually scalded.

It's not a bad recipe, needs more tomato, not sure if that's the recipe or the implementation. I'm ready to tackle the vindaloo this week. Work gloves, check. Face mask, check. Lead apron, check.

planning the next round of packing to Slip Jigs And Reels from the album "Days Of August" by Penny Sidor