In my defense, I've never killed anyone with my culinary attempts. (Jeff has come close a few times.) It's OK, though. I don't have to be great at everything. But there are those occasions when I wish I was better in the kitchen.
Jeff's out on a work trip, and Alison had decided we shouldn't be take-out queens in his absence. She even said she'd been thinking about planning a menu that would have her pitching in to cook. I looked at her funny and asked her to repeat herself. She's known as the Taco Queen for a reason, and she generally looks forward to Jeff's night away from dinner because I'm almost always down to order out.
"I want to make Mango Chicken Curry," she said. "Do we have fresh ginger?"
Here's what it's supposed to look like. Pretty, right?
I should have known things wouldn't work out as planned. Ali woke up Monday feeling bad, complaining of a sore throat and asking if she could come home early from school. She didn't want to miss Chemistry, but didn't think she was up for a full day of learning.
I agreed, and she spent the afternoon and most of the evening on the couch where she went through two boxes of Kleenex as she watched YouTube videos, did homework and picked up notes and assignments online. I glanced at the mangoes I'd bought for her and wondered if they'd make it into the saucepan.
She was feeling better by Tuesday and said she wanted the curry chicken for dinner.
"Do I have time for a bath?" she asked as she darted into her bathroom.
I'm sure what I offered was to prepare the ingredients so she could make the dish.
I sighed. "Mother up," I told myself.
The recipe said it would take 15 minutes to prep. The recipe lied.
I've been known to get halfway into a recipe only to discover I don't have an essential ingredient. This time I was going to be smarter and assemble all the ingredients ahead of time. I needed white vinegar, which was in the far corner of a tall pantry shelf.
In getting it, I knocked over a bottle of fancy olive oil that's infused with hot, red pepper. The fancy cork in the stupid fancy bottle popped out and I had olive oil and red pepper flakes all over the wider, lower shelf. My wasabi peas were safe in their clear plastic box, but the lid was covered in oil. It was everywhere, actually. Oil is good for wood, right?
I mopped up most of the oil and went back to assembling ingredients and reading the recipe.
I had to chop the onion, bell pepper, chicken and mangoes, and mince the garlic and the ginger. I considered that a while. I know what mincing is, but I thought we have a tool for that.
I'm not exactly sure what the tool I used was really for, but it didn't squeeze out little minces of ginger. It was more like a juicer. I ended up chopping the clump of root that emerged and threw the juice into it. I almost kissed the jar of minced garlic I found in the fridge. It was right beside the jar of minced ginger. (I might have cursed when I found that...)
Now for the produce. I debated the difference between "diced" and "chopped" for a while. God forbid I end up with wrong-sized chunks.
I Googled it. Turns out chopping is what my dicing usually turns into when I have to dice too much of something. So I chopped. It also turns out that mangoes are super slippery and have some sort of a fibrous core to them like a pineapple. I was pretty sure that I didn't keep the core. I learned that mangoes are sturdy enough to wash off just fine if they shoot off the cutting board and slide across the floor.
SIDE NOTE: Growing up, my family called green bell peppers "mangoes." Don't know why, but we did. FYI: mangoes are not green bell peppers. Not even close.
The recipe called for a red bell pepper. I had orange. Same thing, right?
I went back to the recipe. Step one was "Cook onions, bell pepper, garlic, ginger, spices.
We didn't have any vegetable oil and I'd spilled all the fricking olive oil. Jeff is always yammering on about the right kind of oil and its smoke point or flame level or some such nonsense. I can never remember which one is right or the for what reason. But ha! I have a can of spray coconut oil. That counts, right? Mangoes and coconuts are both tropical. Close enough.
I sprayed the spray oil until it was near liquid in the pan and threw in the chopped onions and pepper, the minced ginger and garlic and the spices and went back to the recipe.
Crap! The recipe used grammar and tricked me. Step one had a colon. The stupid onions and peppers were supposed to be fried (I mean sauteed) first. Then, the garlic and ginger were to be added and stirred around a bit. The spices were to arrive fashionably late. Oh well. It all was in there and damn if I didn't need to spray the pan with oil again.
I added up the times I was supposed to cook in stages and let it all cook up, spraying here and there like a beauty pageant contestant with a can of Aqua Net.
Step two said to add the vinegar, coconut milk and one of the mangoes. Goddammit! I had chopped the stupid fruit and threw it all in the same bowl. I could estimate half, right? I mean, even I can divide by two. I threw it all in and got it to the simmering point.
I feel I should point out that I was well past the 15-minute point by now. My back hurt, I was working on a case of carpal tunnel, and I had oil in my hair.
It was then I read that I had puree the concoction once it was done simmering. Me, hot, spicy fruit and a blender. That's a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.
I kept telling myself to remember the lid, remember the lid: this stuff is h.o.t. I was glad Ali had the exhaust fan and her speakers on because I was literally talking myself (out loud) through the ordeal.
I remembered the lid. (Ha! You didn't think I would, did you? I totally had a Lucy Ricardo vision, but I worked hard against it.)
Even as I pulsed the blender, I was shaking my head. I don't puree things. Maybe a smoothie, but not a dinner entree. That's Jeff-Reed-level cooking. I so should have made Ali do this.
But, she was sickly, and when she or Jeff is in the kitchen, there's stuff dripping from the ceiling and all over the floor. I may not be a great cook, but I can clean the crap out of things. So far, (other than the oil) I hadn't destroyed the kitchen. I had, however, used up a ton of different vessels. Cleanup was going to take longer than the damn prep.
The puree was supposed to go right back into the pan, which seemed kind of like a cheat, but OK. I was to add the chicken and the mango and cook it for 10 minutes. I took a deep breath, surveyed all that I'd done so far and decided it wasn't a disaster. I tossed it all in and tackled the small mountain of dishes that had multiplied like litter on a post-Spring Break beach.
Crap! The mangoes weren't supposed to mingle with raw chicken. This recipe was not my friend. In its defense, the words were there. I just maybe skimmed a bit more than I should have.
I had to add two tablespoons of fat-free half-and-half because I'd bought light coconut milk, which according to the recipe was like using cardboard instead of lasagna noodles or something. It was a snarky editorial comment that I feel is not appropriate for recipe work, but who cares what I think?
The recipe actually called for heavy whipping cream, "if you "must" use light milk."
Let's get real here. If I bought light coconut milk and "must" use it, what are the chances that I have heavy whipping cream in the house? Right: zero.
Idiot recipe. I was supposed to use "slightly unripe on the firm side" mangoes, too, and be prepared to balance out the sweetness or not-sweetness depending on what level of ripe/firm I ended up with. I guess I could have Googled how to tell when a mango was ripe, but I was still laughing over calling green peppers mangoes. Who can Google when you're giggling?
There was a remedy for the mango state of existence that involved raisins or vinegar, but I decided to skip over that scenario entirely. Ali had -- thank GOD -- told me she didn't want raisins in it. We didn't have raisins anyway.
We also didn't have fresh cilantro to garnish the dish when it was done. It's Tuesday. Tuesday dinner doesn't deserve garnish. That's a weekend thing. A weekend when Jeff is manning the stove.
Anyway, I stir the stuff around and let it cook. Ali emerged from her bath as it reached the end of its suggested cook time. She peered into the saucepan. She'd been in the bath approximately six hours. (It was maybe less than that, but it seemed like a long time.)
"There's a lot of liquid in there," she remarked.
"Yeah, I may not have had exactly the right amount of chicken," I said.
The recipe called for 1-and-a-quarter pounds of chicken. I had two breasts leftover from a larger event. They were in an unmarked Ziplock freezer bag. I have no idea how many pounds it was. It had taken FOREVER to chop into bite-sized pieces and I'd had to trim off gross wads of fat. It looked like enough. I sure didn't want to thaw and chop more.
"Did you weigh it?" Ali-of-the-bath asked.
Uncle James got her a fancy kitchen scale for Christmas. It lives next to the blender, but I averted my eyes from it. I really didn't want to chop more chicken than I had to.She tasted it and said it might be OK anyway. "I'm going to add frozen peas," she said.
Cool, I thought. Better peas than raisins. I microwaved some rice and she took her bowl to her sick couch.
"Hey Mom," she called. "Can you bring me more Kleenex?"
I walked into the room and directed her to the Kleenex behind her, within arm's reach.
"It's really good!" she said, snatching the box and grinning.
"It's really good," she repeated.
I snatched my phone and started taking pictures. She told me to stop taking pictures.
"It's not very often I do things right," I explained.
"You do things right," she said. "Just not in the kitchen."
She's lucky she's sick.
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