A recipe that required some finagling

There have to be some big perks to living in a major metropolitan city, to balance out the challenge of dealing with our eroding transportation system. The biggest one might be food: in New York, you can eat anything from anywhere, so if you, like me, are from a family whose food heritage runs in the range of Western European to Western European, there's not much pressure to learn to make cuisines outside those you've been brought up eating. You can buy it, more cheaply, easily, and much tastier than if you made it yourself.

That explains why a lot of what's in Fave Recipes skews the way it does; though my dad ate almost anything, in my recollection, he didn't do much experimenting with anything he knew someone else could make better than he could. We tried making pierogis from scratch for bit, but stopped when they didn't get to the place where they tasted better than we could get them from a Polish grocer. That means that this week's addition to my repertoire is an outlier in the book, and one I've been eying. I've put it off because it was a little daunting, mostly because I have only the faintest memory of what it should taste like.

The recipe comes from our longtime babysitter Lisa, who was Trinidadian by way of India, a heritage I was relatively fascinated by as a young child, no doubt foreshadowing my eventual history degree. There were lots of things I loved about Lisa: how kind she was, that her daughter gave me all of her hand-me-down Barbies, and her explanation that you could use the inside of an aloe plant to salve wounds. And there was this chicken, not so much a vivid stamp on my childhood as a scent I can still recall, ever-so-slightly wafting through the recesses of my mind.

As you can see from the recipes here for her chicken and potatoes, they are not exactly precise. The order, amount and pacing of ingredients is almost nonexistent. What's there is a list of foods, and you have to do the rest.

I decided that though these recipes were delineated, I'd make them together in one pot as a type of curry, because I had very little to go on. (More on this later.) Given the haphazard manner in which I was going about this -- limited research, both from written materials and also people ​who would have been familiar with a meal like this -- I kept winging it and cooked with some stuff I already had. I used leeks instead of scallions because they are basically just a larger, less pungent scallion (plus I had one I wanted to use up), and chicken legs instead of thighs because that's what was available at my new market, which appears to be a Bravo but might also not have a name.

I decided the splashes of Worcestershire, soy sauce and "catsup" were probably for marinating the chicken, so I coated it with all that and set it aside. Then I prepped the rest of the ingredients. I heated the oil, added the (brown) sugar. Shockingly, if you google "sugar rising" you get a lot of articles about diabetes, not what sugar does when you put it into a hot pot of oil. I basically let it go for a few minutes and hoped it was sufficiently risen. The caramelization when the chicken hit the pan was mouthwatering, and the whole thing, unsurprisingly, smelled and felt a bit like BBQing.

Now the confusing part. I decided once I flipped the chicken to throw everything in the pot at once. As might be obvious at this point, I just moved -- so I'm trying to figure out what is high, medium and low on my stove. (Also, no more small fridge means I now sort of forget what I have in there, which is quite a new problem to have!) As I jiggled the pan around, i added a bunch of curry powder, putting in more in as I went, before adding some water. I cooked everything covered for a bit, but then uncovered at the end to let some of the water boil off.

As you'll see above, at no point does this recipe call for salt and pepper, the given of every savory food -- at least salt is. Maybe that was another thing Lisa and my dad thought was implied. I generously added both throughout cooking, but the final result was still not quite salty enough and I added more to my serving. The whole thing honestly seemed like the ideal meal for the Instant Pot, but I'm still a little daunted by that contraption and will have to whip it out next time.

Since I barely remember how this tasted when I was a kid, only that I liked it, I can't get anywhere close to saying whether it was even close to an accurate interpretation of it. It certainly wouldn't have impressed anyone with any passing knowledge of the cuisines it hails from. But the smell still magically brought me back to some strange pocket memory, and I ate until I was stuffed.

I later talked to my mom about the meal, and shockingly, she had far more specific things to say about it than I. She clarified that the chicken and potatoes were yes, two separate dishes, but that Lisa would cook them at the same time because they were her favorites. "She would make them at the loft and leave them for us to eat, or sometimes bring them already prepared from home," my mom told me. What I had attempted was more along the lines of one of the zillion ways to make curry, some more authentic than others. Lisa would sometimes serve her potatoes with roti, though often that term is used as a catchall for everything seen here -- the meat, the potatoes, the chickpeas, the curry.

So my winging it, which can sometimes work very well, didn't exactly lead me to the exact house I was supposed to be in -- it was more like the same large town. My mild hope that autopilot would kick in and I would know what I was supposed to be doing was dashed. But as I sat there alone holding my empty bowl, with just the ceiling fan quietly whirring for company, I thought a bit about how scary it can be to do something even as basic as cook a dish out of your comfort zone. Not scary like you'll fall and hurt yourself, but scary like you have no concept of it, and what if you embarrass yourself, even if you're the only person around. While I normally enjoy nothing more than feeding others, I was happy this time to be alone with just me and my experiment. If I'm feeling generous, that discomfort or fear of the unknown explains some of what we've seen lately, an unwillingness to go further than a surface-level exploration of what we're engaging with, to challenge our own beliefs and hypocrisies. I'm not usually feeling that generous though: with such delicious smells, how would you not love and want to know where they came from? How can you actively disassociate without having curiosity? How can you value your love of comfort over an interest in not getting too comfortable?

Enjoy this highly unflattering photo.

In this case, the chicken was tender, the flavor was almost there, and memories I couldn't remember having were coming back. Next time I'm going to marinate longer, and start reading up. Not in that order.

KATE

P.S. Thank you to everyone who was feeling the mac and cheese. Make it! It's delicious.