Cooking Boot Camp
Use All Your Burners
By
Lindsay Sterling
A friend once told me that he’d never
seen anyone cook with all four burners at once. It never dawned on him that this
was even possible. I suppose technical capability surpassing actual usage is like
driving a sport utility vehicle on suburban roads to get sushi at Whole Foods.
Or riding a mountain bike on sidewalks to get a pedicure. We live with untapped
brute capabilities underlying our daily lives a lot. But should we? What if we
all just started doing what we could do, instead of what we do do? As I imagine
us tearing up every last square inch of wilderness in a frenzy of off-roading
madness, I take that back. But what harm could there be in using all four
burners at once?
Check the expiration date on your
fire extinguisher, because I have the perfect four-burner meal for you to try. I
just witnessed Hermeet Kohli, from Delhi, India, cooking her son’s favorite
Indian meal for his birthday: north Indian kidney bean curry (rajma), rice with cumin (jira), spiced potatoes, yogurt sauce, and
flatbread (roti). It’s all
vegetarian. None of the dishes in themselves were hard to cook, and it really
was a treat to sit before a plate full of distinct flavors.
She started by making her Punjabi
version of curry paste by slowly cooking pureed onions, ginger, garlic, tomato
paste, turmeric and Indian chili powder. The pureed ingredients had to cook for
an hour and a half to become a paste, and she stood there stirring most of the
time. Hermeet warned after about an hour, “Once you burn your onions, you’ll
have to start all over again.” Since she’s a busy professor of social work at University
of Southern Maine and a mom, she does have a slew of short cuts she uses to
keep her family well fed.
“Sometimes I get frozen cut
potatoes from Trader Joe's,” she says, “and when I cook, I cook a lot.” She makes
ten times more curry paste than she’ll need and then freezes extra portions. With
these she can easily whip up any variety of Punjabi curry after work – chicken,
prawn, beans, or potatoes and peas. When she does eventually run out of homemade
curry paste, and she doesn’t have time to make another batch, she’ll use a
canned Indian curry paste from Shaw’s with pretty good results. In a real
pinch, she’ll use a jar of tomato sauce and simply add Indian spices, onions
and garlic.
While the curry paste was growing
thicker on one burner, on another burner she sautéed whole cumin seeds with onion
slices in oil and then added basmati rice. On another burner she was frying
potato slivers with turmeric, cumin, coriander, Indian chili powder, dried mint
and salt. And on another burner she was cooking kidney beans in water in a
pressure cooker. When the curry paste was thick and holding together as a solid
mass, she added a large spoonful of it to the beans along with garam masala,
funugreek leaves, coriander leaves (aka cilantro) and salt. When the potatoes,
rice, and beans were done, she rolled out discs of roti dough, which then
puffed up like pufferfish as they were heating up on the skillet.
Was cooking with four burners
possible? Yes. Should you do it, or just read this story and feel good that you
could do it if you wanted to? Up to you. The curry was like a flavor-packed
chili from a different land; the potatoes round and warm and interesting paired
with that mint; the yogurt cool and balancing; the rice, neutral and bejeweled
with peas; and the roti, a nice variation on homemade bread.
Click at right for recipes and how-to photos.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2014
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2014
