Posts Tagged With: curry

Curry Chicken Potjiekos From Namibia

Posted on December 4, 2022 by pauldelancey

Namibian Entree

CURRY CHICKEN POTJIEKOS

INGREDIENTS

2 garlic cloves
2 onions
2″ ginger root
3 pounds chicken, breast, thighs, or drumsticks
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1½ tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon coriander
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
½ tablespoon turmeric
2½ cups chicken stock
3 carrots
1 pound potatoes
1 bay leaf

SPECIAL UTENSILS (If difficult conditions are met)

potjie: this is a cast-iron pot with three legs and is the authentic for this dish. Order it online.
hot coals: The potjie’s contents are cooked over hot coals and firewood. Will your landlord mind?

ORDINARY UTENSILS (If, as likely, the above conditions aren’t met. )

large pot
stove

Serves 4. Takes 2 hours 20 minutes.

PREPARATION

Dice garlic cloves and onions. Grate ginger. Add butter, vegetable oil and as many chicken pieces as will without touching to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until chicken browns all over. Flip chicken enough to ensure even browning. (You might need to cook in batches.) Remove chicken and set aside. Add garlic and onion to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat for 4 minutes or until garlic and onion soften. Stir frequently. Add curry powder, ground cloves, coriander, ginger, nutmeg, salt, and turmeric. Sauté at medium heat for two minutes. Stir frequently.

Return chicken to pot. Add chicken stock; enough to cover chicken. Cover and simmer at low heat for 1 hour. While pot simmers, dice carrots. Peel and cut potatoes into ½” cubes. Add bay leaf, carrot, and potato or until carrot and potatoes soften. Stir until well blended. Cover and simmer at low heat for another ½ hour. Remove bay leaf. Stir occasionally.

TIDBITS

1) Lots of famous people are named after foods and dishes,

2) And vice versa.

3) Here’s a partial list in alphabetical order of their food names.

Fiona Apple – Famous songwriter and singer. Composed and sang “Extraordinary machine.” When a recording company decided to not release one of her albums, her fans mailed the company apples until they release it after all.

Arnold Palmer – Great golfer. Gave his name to a lemonade-and-iced-tea drink.

Kevin Bacon – in many movies including A Few Good Men.

Shaun Bean – in many movies, including National Treasure and the BBC series Sharpe.

Halle Berry – in many movies including Monster’s Ball.

Brie Larson – in many movies including, Short Term 12. The doctor who delivered was Brita Larson and was a friend of my grandmother. I have visited Dr. Larson’s old farm in Sweden.

Hamilton Burger – D.A. on the show Perry Mason. Fictitious character with a great name.

John Candy – best known for the Canadian TV show, “Second City.”

Cherry Jones- in many movies including The Perfect Storm..

Rosemary Clooney – Chart-topping singer during the 1950s.

Tim Curry – in many movies, plays, etc, including Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Ginger Rogers – Great dance and actress. Starred in many movies with Fred Astaire.

Meatloaf – Born Marvin Lee Aday. Famous singer. Made Bat Out of Hell album.

Barry Pepper – in many movies including Saving Private Ryan.

Condoleezza Rice – Press Secretary of State, the second person to President George W. Bush

Tim Salmon – All Star outfielder for the California Angels.

Shirley Temple – Great actress. Ambassador for the US. Childhood acquaintance of my mother. Gave her name to a drink of grenadine, ginger ale* soda, and maraschino cherry. * = There’s a bit of controversy here. Some people insist that the soda is lemon lime.

Darryl Strawberry – All star right fielder for the New York Mets.

 

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D. (but not with cell phones)

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Mchicha From Tanzania (Spinach and Peanut Curry)

Posted on July 11, 2022 by pauldelancey

Tanzanian Entree

MCHICHA
(Spinach and Peanut Curry)

INGREDIENTS

1 medium onion
1½ pounds spinach
1 tomato
2½ tablespoons ghee or butter
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup coconut milk
2½ tablespoons creamy peanut butter

SPECIAL UTENSIL

food processor (You really need this unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time chopping by hand, or so a friend told me when his food processor died just as the spinach dicing started.)

Serves 6. Takes 40 minutes.

PREPARATION

Dice onion, spinach, and tomato. Add ghee, onion, tomato, curry powder, and salt to pan. Sauté at medium heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add spinach. Lower heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes. (Do not let spinach get mushy.) Stir enough to prevent burning. Add coconut milk and creamy peanut butter. Simmer for 3 minutes or until peanut butter blends in completely. Stir occasionally.

Goes well with rice beans, or maize porridge.

TIDBITS

1) Popeye the Sailor ManTM loved spinach.

2) It also made him strong

3) Tanzania should have its own version of Popeye.

4) Papaye Mtu Baharia is quite possibly a correct translation of his name into Swahili.

5) The most popular name for men in Tanzania is James.

6) So, I give you James Mtu Baharia, Tanzania’s strong spinach-eating hero.

 

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Sri Lankan Beef Smore – New Tidbits

Posted on August 4, 2021 by pauldelancey

Sri Lankan Entree

BEEF SMORE

INGREDIENTS

2 pound piece of sirloin or beef chuck
2 tablespoons vinegar
½ teaspoon pepper
3 garlic cloves
1″ ginger root
1 small green chile
1 large onion
1 stalk lemongrass (tender inner bottom part only)
2½ tablespoons ghee or vegetable oil
2″ cinnamon stick
¼ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
10 fresh curry leaves or ½ teaspoon dry curry leaves or curry powder
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1¼ cups coconut milk
1 tablespoon lemon or tamarind juice

Serves 6. Takes 2 hour 30 minutes

PREPARATION

Make holes in beef with fork. (This will aid marinating.) Add beef, vinegar, and pepper to bowl. Marinate for 1 hour.

While beef marinates. Mince garlic cloves, ginger root, green chile, and onion. Seed and mince green chile. Thinly slice lemongrass. Add ghee to pan. Heat ghee at high heat until is hot enough to make a fenugreek seed dance. Carefully add beef to pan. Sauté for 2 minutes on each side or until browned all over. Remove meat to plate. Leave beef juices in pan.

Add garlic, ginger, green chile, onion, cinnamon stick, fenugreek seeds, fresh curry leaves. and lemongrass Sauté for 3 minutes on medium heat. Stir frequently. Add beef back to pan. Add beef, red pepper flakes, coconut milk, and lime juice. Lower heat to low and simmer 40 minutes or until the beef reaches your desired level of doneness and coconut milk reduces to a gravy. Turn beef over every 10 minutes. Slice beef to your desired thickness. Spoon onion gravy over beef slices.

TIDBITS

1) Every recipe in this cookbook requires a clock, a wristwatch, or a timer. But what would anyone do way back when there were no such timepieces? Why they’d use sundials of course. But, but, this recipes requires us to sauté beef for 2 minutes. Wouldn’t that require a precision lacking in normal sundials? Of course, that’s why serious ancient chefs always used. precision sundials. But such sundials cost quite a lot and weren’t very portable, not even if you had many servants. So they kinda fell into disuse. Cloudy countries never adapted these new timepieces at all.

 

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Coconut Shrimp Curry

Posted on February 24, 2021 by pauldelancey

Sri Lankan Entree

COCONUT SHRIMP CURRY

INGREDIENTS

3 garlic cloves
1½” ginger root
2 small green chiles
1 medium onion
1 small tomato
12 fresh curry leaves
1 teaspoon dry curry leaves, or curry powder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cinnamon stick
4 teaspoons curry powder
½ teaspoon red pepper flakes
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon turmeric
1½ tablespoons lime juice
1 13.5-ounce can coconut milk
1¼ pounds shrimp (about 24 count)

Serves 4. Takes 45 minutes.

PREPARATION

Mince garlic cloves, ginger root, green chiles, and onion. Dice tomato. Add garlic, ginger, chiles, curry leaves, onion, and oil to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add tomato, cinnamon stick, curry powder, red pepper flakes, salt, and turmeric. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 5 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Add lime juice and coconut milk. Cook on medium heat for 10 minutes or until coconut milk thickens. Stir frequently. Add shrimp. Reduce heat to low-medium and simmer for 4 minutes or until shrimp turns orange or pink.

TIDBITS

1) The grass that cows eat affects the taste of butter that is made from their milk. Indeed, butter from Isigny Sainte Mère is the best tasting in the world. Why? The area’s rich pastures are chock full of mineral salts and just the right traces for buttery excellence.

2) Shrimp cooked in coconut milk tastes great. So, of course, shrimp vendors tried feeding coconut milk to these little crustaceans. But expecting shrimp to climb up trees and crack open the coconuts resulted in disappointment. Nothing happened even when they put the shrimp in trees. Of course! Shrimp can’t breathe out of water. The shrimpers tried planting coconut trees in water. It turned out that coconuts trees don’t grow in water. The once plucky entrepreneurs gave up the whole idea. Now we’ll never know if shrimp could have been trained to extract milk from coconuts.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Currywurst

Posted on January 31, 2021 by pauldelancey

German Entree

CURRYWURST

INGREDIENTS

1 large onion
1½ tablespoons vegetable oil (1 more tablespoon later)
1½ tablespoons curry powder
½ teaspoon chili powder
2 teaspoons paprika
½ teaspoon salt
1 pound tomato sauce
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 pound bratwurst, knockwurst, or kielbasa
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Serves 3. Takes 50 minutes.

PREPARATION

Mince onion. Add onion and 1½ tablespoons vegetable oil to pot. Sauté at medium-high heat or until onion softens. Stir frequently. Add curry powder, chili powder, paprika, and salt. Reduce heat to medium and sauté for 1 minute. Stir frequently. Add tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Stir enough to prevent sauce from burning.

While sauce simmers, slice bratwurst into ½” slices. Add bratwurst and 1 tablespoon vegetable oil to pan. Sauté at medium heat for 10 minutes. Flip and stir bratwurst slices until they are all browned on both sides. Pour sauce over bratwurst slices and serve. Goes well with French fries.

TIDBITS

1) The city state of Ur was founded nearly 6,000 years when social media required flint chisels and stone. Archeologists–woo, spelled it right the first time, have found previous few examples of trolling in wall-platform comments’ sections, probably because they took several days to upload. Even then, the ripostes limited themselves to the likes of “Sez you.” and “So’s, your mother.”

2) So, Urs?, Urps?, Curs?,citizens of Ur generally expressed themselves in the culinary arts. German sausages were quite popular, thousands of years before the creation of the modern Germany. So far, culinary historians, always a fractious bunch, haven’t arrived at a consensus explaining this.

3) However, we know that Ramses II, pharaoh of Ancient Egypt–an inventor of the first condom, it still bears his name, loved Nile sausages. He hated the imports from Ur. “Ugh,” he said, “Those Curs, their sausage is the worst.” It was then only a hop, skip, and jump to the calling the foreign sausage, “Curry Wurst.” Currywurst, however, experienced a renaissance with the advent of refrigeration and air travel between Ur and Berlin. It’s now quite popular in the German capital.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Theluli Mas (Spicy Fried Tuna)

Posted on February 20, 2017 by pauldelancey

Maldivian Entree

THELULI MAS
(Spicy Fried Tuna)

INGREDIENTSthelulimas

1 small onion
5 garlic cloves
4 curry leaves or 2 tablespoons curry powder
2½ teaspoons peppercorns
2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
½ teaspoon salt
1½ pounds tuna steaks
½ cup vegetable oil
1 lemon

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour.

PREPARATION

Add onion, garlic cloves, curry leaves, peppercorns, red pepper flakes, and salt to blender. Blend on medium until you get a smooth paste. Add tuna and smooth paste to large mixing bowl. Turn tuna steaks until they are well ll coated. Cover and marinate in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Add oil. Heat oil on medium-high heat. It will hot enough when a pepper flake put in the oil starts to dance. Carefully add tuna steaks to pan. (Tilt pan away from you as you do so.) Sauté at medium-high heat for 3 minutes on each side or until steaks become crispy and turn golden brown.
Cut lemon into as many slices as there are tuna steaks. Add a lemon slice next to each steak.

TIDBITS

1) Tuna is an anagram for nut. Tuna love nuts, especially the macadamia nut. “Macadamia nut” is an anagram for “Dam’ manic nut..” Tuna who taste macadamia develop an instant addiction. Fortunately, macadamia nuts are rarely found in the ocean. But they are found in the waters where cruise ships travel. Unthinking passengers adore the tuna who, desperate for a fix, perform all sorts of acrobatic and aquatic tricks.

2) Then the cruise ships move on, leaving in their wake desperate, addicted schools of tuna. Some places there get vicious, particularly where the amphibious variety of tuna abounds. In Macadamia Grove, Australia, gangs of crazed tuna thrash through the town to stampede the macadamia groves. They eat every single nut they can find and if their fix isn’t satisfied, they come back to assault the stores. People flee in terror; there’s nothing more vicious than a strung-out tuna. The townsfolk shake their fists at the tuna. “Dam’ manic nuts.”

3) This sad event happens to Macadamia Grove repeatedly. Its people are planning to leave their childhood homes for good and become a tribe of wandering mimes. Please don’t let this happen. Obey the signs that read, “Don’t feed the dolphins.” Thank you.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Bunny Chow

Posted on September 30, 2016 by pauldelancey

South African Entree

BUNNY CHOW

INGREDIENTSbunnychow

1 medium onion
3 medium potatoes
4 cardamom pods
1 cinnamon stick
½ teaspoon fennel seeds
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tomatoes
2 pounds chicken breasts or lamb
3 fresh curry leaves
3 tablespoons Durban masala (See recipe)
⅓ cup chicken stock
2 1-lb whole white loaves
1 tablespoon fresh cilantro

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour.

SPECIAL UTENSIL

Dutch oven

PREPARATION

Dice onion. Peel potatoes. Cut potatoes into 1″ cubes. Add onion, potato, cardamom pods, cinnamon stick, fennel seeds, and vegetable oil to Dutch oven. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Stir constantly. Remove from heat.

Dice tomatoes. Cut chicken into 1″ cubes. Add Durban masala, Add tomato, chicken, curry leaves, and Durban masala to Dutch oven. Cook using medium heat for 5 minutes. Stir frequently. Add chicken stock. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes or until potato is tender and chicken is no longer pink inside. Remove Dutch oven from heat. Discard cinnamon stick.

Slice bread loaf in half along its length. Use sharp knife to cut off most of the soft white bread from each half. Leave ½”-to-1″ of bread crust along the edges and bottoms. (The scooped out bread can be made into bread crumbs.) Ladle potato/tomato/chicken mixture into each hollowed-out loaf half. Garnish with coriander. Repeat for second bread loaf.

TIDBITS

1) Bunnies are naturally fierce fighters. Armies everywhere had them. Napoleon wouldn’t have dreamed of conquering Europe without his corps of bunny irregulars.

2) But you say, “Aha, Napoleon didn’t conquer Europe. See, you’re wrong. Bunnies aren’t so fierce.” Ho, ho, they are. Napoleon won victory after victory up until 1808 with his beserker bunnies.

3) Then, Napoleon invaded Spain. Spain had guerrilla fighters. More importantly, it had battle hardened bunnies. Conquistador bunnies. Bunnies that pushed Moors out of the Iberian positions during the centuries of La Reconquista. Bunnies that had accompanied Cortes to Mexico, Pizarro to Peru, and Albondigas to Greenland. Bunnies that terrified conquered peoples into quiet submission for centuries.

4) The French army never had been on the receiving end of a bunny charge. Never had seen those twitching noses and the unreasoning terror that engendered. Never had to see a sea of bunny tails popping up and down as they stamped toward them . . .

5) where they nibbled your shoes and your shoelaces and so you tripped and your comrades laughed and laughed at you and felt so ashamed that you deserted the army and ran home where you sold sprigs of cilantro which tastes like soap to some people which was okay because all life tasted like soap to you and you spent the rest of your life thinking in run-on sentences.

6) And even if you managed to man up and stand your ground after all that, the bunnies would bite your ankles repeatedly which often hurt, particularly so when their teeth actually broke your skin.

7) Suppose you were a stalwart sort, a man among and you were still fighting bunnies crazed beyond belief by sangria, you’d still have to deal with the bunnies’ powerful rear legs, legs that could kick a potato twenty feet.

8) Imagine. You’ve seen their twitching noses, their bobbing cottontails, had your shoelaces nibbled in two, had your ankles bitten, and now they’re hurting your shins and they won’t stop. And then, and then, they keep your potatoes twenty feet away where they get smooshed in the heat of battle.

9) You have no food. So, you confiscate some local food, some paella perhaps, but your body hasn’t faced Spanish food bacteria. So, now you’re a French soldier in Spain fighting for an emperor who only cares about himself and you have the mother of all stomach aches. You throw thrown your musket and flee.

10) The rest of your comrades see that you, a man among men, are fleeing. They realize the fight is lost. They flee as well. Your army is routed. Bunny-fear demoralizes the other French armies. French forces reel back to France. Allied hordes attack Paris and storm the Montmarte. France capitulates. Your flight from the Spanish battlefield brought all this about.

11) The French Emperor Napoleon gets exiled to Elba. The long-time leader gives a farewell to his Old Guard, “Adieu mes amis, nous sommes battus vaillamment et aurions gagné mais pour ce lecteur de recette et sa peur des lapins.”*

* = “Good buy my friends, we fought valiantly and would have won but for this read reader of recipes and his fear of bunnies. (Sorry, apparently Napoleon’s French is only as good as mine. Weird.)

12) So you’ve changed history. Awesome responsibility, isn’t it?

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

Categories: cuisine, history, international | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Omelette Curry

Posted on March 14, 2016 by pauldelancey

Sri Lankan Breakfast

OMELETTE CURRY

INGREDIENTS – OMELETTECurryOmelette-

3 green chiles
1 large onion (1 medium onion later)
3 fresh curry leaves or 3 teaspoons dried leaf fragments or 3 teaspoons dried basil (10 leaves more later)
1½ tablespoons sesame oil (1 tablespoon more later)
6 eggs
1 tomato
½ teaspoon pepper 1/8 teaspoon more later)
1 teaspoon salt (¼ teaspoon more later)

INGREDIENTS – CURRY

½” cinnamon stick
¾ teaspoon grated ginger (½” whole ginger)
½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 garlic clove
1 medium onion
10 fresh curry leaves or 10 teaspoons dried leaf fragments or 10 teaspoons dried basil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 teaspoons curry powder (not the same thing as curry leaves)
2 teaspoons chili powder
⅛ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon turmeric
½ cup water
1 cup coconut milk

SPECIAL UTENSIL

spice grinder

Makes 4 bowls. Takes 50 minutes.

PREPARATION – OMELETTE

Mince green chiles and onions. Add green chile, onion, 3 curry leaves, and sesame oil to pan. Sauté on medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Remove green chile, onion, and curry leaves from heat. Add eggs to large mixing bowl. Whisk eggs. Dice tomato. Add green chile, onion, tomato, pepper, and salt. Mix with whisk until well blended.

Reduce heat to low. Add all ingredients in mixing bowl to pan. Fry on low heat for 10-to-15 minutes or until omelette is cooked to your desired level of doneness. Remove omelette. Cut omelette into squares. You get quite a bit of latitude in the size of your squares. 1″ perhaps?

(However, there is unanimity on the geometric shape. It has to be a square. What would happen if you cut the omelette into triangles? Would the Omelette Police come after you? Would the Earth’s surface convulse in earthquakes? I don’t know. Play it safe, make squares.)

PREPARATION – CURRY

While omelette cooks, grind cinnamon and ginger. Grind fenugreek seeds just long enough to crack them. Dice garlic clove and onion. Add cinnamon, ginger, onion, 10 curry leaves, curry powder, fenugreek seeds, and sesame oil. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Add chili powder, ⅛ teaspoon pepper, ¼ teaspoon salt, turmeric, and water. Stir with spoon until well blended. Simmer on low heat for 3 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add coconut milk. Simmer for 5 minutes or until curry starts to thicken. Stir occasionally.

Add omelette squares back into curry. Simmer on low heat for 2 minutes. Stir occasionally. Goes well with naan bread or rice.

TIDBITS

1) Omelette Curry is an an anagram for the illustrious Portguese navigator and explorer, Telemeo T. Crucy. Senhor Crucy rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486 and discovered the Indian Ocean by way of the Atlantic. Bartolomeo Diaz did the same in 1488. Telemeo also discovered India via this sea route in 1487. Vasco de Gama duplicated this feat twelve years later.

2) But Crucy the Explorer–the inspiration for Dora the ExplorerTM by the way–got no credit at all, no monuments, no cities, no holidays, not even candy bars named after him. What the heck? Why?

3) Because he was the first one to bring the spicy curry leaves back to Portugal. Of course, the King of Portugal, whose name is lost to us as I am typing in WordPerfect and I’d have to get out of WordPerfect and into my internet browser, by which time I would have lost my train of thought here and degenerated into writing long, rambling sentences.

4) It was João II. The king’s name was João II! I looked it up. Who knew?

5) Anyway, Big Joe, as the king was often by his adoring subjects, was the first to be served the curry leaves. Portuguese monarchs, by established right, got to taste every new spice first.

6) Which was a mistake in this case. No chef in the king’s kitchen knew how much curry to put in the king’s chicken noodle soup. So they guessed.

7) One cup was a bad guess. Big Joe fled the banquet hall. He wasn’t seen for days. But his moans were heard all over the castle. They still can. Even his ghost has yet to get over this tummy ache.

8) Things deteriorated rapidly. Big Joe started hating the world. He tripled taxes on the peasantry. The despising people called him João the Moaner. The Moaner stripped Telemeo of his titles and erased all vestiges of his name. Proper spicing is a must. May this cookbook help.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Danish Meatballs in Curry (boller i karry)

Posted on March 23, 2014 by pauldelancey

Danish Entree

MEATBALLS IN CURRY
(boller i karry)

INGREDIENTS – MEATBALLSMeatballsCurry-

4 garlic cloves
2 small onions
½ pound ground beef
½ pound ground pork
1 cup bread crumbs
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 cups beef stock

INGREDIENTS – CURRY SAUCE

2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 leek
1 medium onion
4 tablespoons flour
3/4 cup cream
1 teaspoon chives
1 teaspoon parsley

Serves 6, particularly if everyone eats 1/6th of this.

PREPARATION – MEATBALLS

Mince garlic cloves and 2 small onions. Mix ground beef, ground pork, bread crumbs, garlic, onion, egg, pepper, and salt with hands in mixing bowl. Make 1″ meatballs.

Add beef stock to large pot. Bring beef stock to boil on high heat. Carefully add meatballs to pot. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes or until meatballs begin to float. Remove meatballs from pot and set aside. Save the beef broth in pot.

PREPARATION – CURRY SAUCE

While meatballs simmer, dice leek, and medium onion. Add butter, curry powder, leek, and diced medium onion. Sauté on medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until diced medium onion softens. Stir frequently. Add flour. Mix well with spoon. Gradually mix in 2 1/2 cups of broth taken from pot or until sauce thickens. Add cream and meatballs. Reduce heat to low. Simmer for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Sprinkle chives and parsley on top. This dish goes well over rice.

TIDBITS

1) The meatball is really a smaller version of meatloaf. Some people have meatballs as a topping for their pizzas.

2) Wouldn’t a meatloaf pizza be exciting? Imagine getting a 16″ pizza topped with three 9″ by 6″ meatloaves. It would feed an army.

3) The Roman Empire is known for its all conquering armies. It’s less known for its culinary achievements. That’s a shame as Rome is the birthplace of the meatball. Rome rocks.

4) Okay, ancient Rome didn’t rock for everyone, the slaves, for example, come to mind as do the people of the many conquered nations.

5) One might wonder how the Roman Empire kept all its conquered peoples from continually revolting. After all, the legions marched everywhere and took longer than waiting in lines at Disneyland to get from their barracks to disaffected regions.

6) The answer is in the massive stockpiles of meatballs kept at all the crossroads of the Empire. As long as the Roman authorities could rush meatballs to its conquered peoples, no riot ever grew so large the slowly arriving legionnaires couldn’t handle it.

7) Rome almost fell to barbarians, in the third century A.D., when they lost the province of Dacia with its rich cattle lands. Fewer cattle, fewer meatballs. Fewer meatballs, more riots. More riots not stopped with meatballs, more revolts. And that meant legions got withdrawn from the frontiers to put the revolts. Barbarians poured across the sparsely defended border.

8) It really appeared as Rome was going to fall. Fortunately the cattlemen of Dacia organized cattle drives to still safe provinces such as Cisalpine Gaul and Thracia. “Head ‘em up, move ‘em out.” Meatball production bounced back within a few decades and the Empire recovered.

9) In 405, however, the health sage, Atticus Bananicus, convinced the legionnaires to go vegetarian. As a result, many of Rome’s cattlemen switched to raising free-range chickens.

10) But in 406, Bananicus was seen by legionnaires eating a meatball pizza. The dormant meatball tastes of the Roman soldiers came out of hibernation. All at once, every soldier demanded meatballs. But there were no longer enough meatballs for the army and the peoples of Rome. The army garnered all the meatballs, leaving none for the restive populace. Unquenchable revolts erupted everywhere. The entire Roman army abandoned the frontier, getting decimated putting down the ferocious uprisings.

12) Alaric and the Visigoths–that sounds like a 60s rock band doesn’t it?–sacked Rome in 410 A.D.. The Roman Empire never rebounded from this disaster and soon collapsed. Always keep meatballs in your refrigerator. It’s frightening to contemplate what would happen if our supermarkets ran out of that peace-ensuring food.

13) Food connoisseurs are invited to read book II of Marcus Gavius Apicus’ “De re coquinaria libri decem (Cuisine in Ten Books)” to see the world’s first recipe for meatballs. And feel at peace.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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Bosna (Austrian Sandwich)

Posted on November 20, 2013 by pauldelancey

Austrian Entree

BOSNA

INGREDIENTSBosna-

12 bratwursts
6 wide rolls
½ yellow onion
1 tablespoon curry
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
3 tablespoons ketchup

PREPARATION

Grill bratwursts at low heat for about 5-to-10 minutes or until they start to brown. Turn once. Toast rolls in toaster or panini grill. Slice onion into rings. Place onion rings and sprinkle curry evenly over bottom halves of rolls. Spread mustard and ketchup evenly on top halves of rolls. Assemble roll bottom, 2 bratwursts, and roll top for each sandwich.

TIDBITS

1) For those people who always complain that family vacations are boring, that trips to the Grand Canyon are so old school, may I suggest an exciting tour based on the ingredients of this recipe?

The National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin. Come visit the alluring world of mustard.

For the world’s best Dijon mustard, go to Dijon, France and take in the Amora Mustard Museum.

1st German Bratwurst Museum in Holzhausen, Germany. Bratwursts were first mentioned in 1404 and in 1432 became one of the first foods to be regulated. Save your money and fly there.

Vidalia Onion Museum in Vidalia, Georgia, where you can you learn the story of this illustrious sweet onion. “Please do not pick the onions.”

Currywurst Museum in Berlin, Germany. Germans love their currywurst. Indeed, Germany is a great place to do a food-museum trek.

National Bread Museum in Seia, Portugal, where you not only get to see the wonders of bread history, but you get to eat bread made at the museum’s fine restaurant. The museum even has a room dedicated to entertaining children. Does this mean food fights for the kids? They didn’t say.

See these museums without delay. The Yokohama Curry Museum closed its doors in 2007. Do you want to go through life regretting not seeing The National Mustard Museum or the National Bread Museum? I think not.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.

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