Dorm Cooking 01: [Guest Post] Chicken Curry for First-Time Cooks of Non-Veggie

[Guest-Post by Anita Dixit]

1. Take down from the supermarket shelf the smallest available pack of chicken drumsticks. Look at it with some trepidation. Replace. Take down again. Replace. Repeat three times. Finally, cross fingers and buy.

2. Take home and announce to unsuspecting spouse 'I have bought chicken drumsticks. I'm going to cook them myself.' Ignore his look of panic. Also ignore his pleading look as he says 'will you also take off the skin yourself?' He's trying to make you say No. Don't say no - you're going to do this all on your own!

3. Open packaging. Take final, scared, look at chicken. Then grasp firmly. Let out a sigh as you find that it does not feel slimy, or ooze blood onto your hands, or any such disgusting thing.

4. Remove skin. Correction, attempt to remove skin. Chicken will resist having its skin removed and tenaciously cling onto it. Do not give up. Continue to pull off skin.

5. After two drumsticks have been skinned, start swearing fluently under your breath. This makes the skinning easier. A sentence like 'saale, tu kya, tera baap bhi niklega!' is extremely effective. Preferably, swearing should be done in one's native tongue. However, take care to keep the volume down, to prevent spouse offering to help again. You DID want to do this yourself, didn't you?

6. After skinning four drumsticks, start contemplating philosophical issues: why would a dead chicken be so attached to its skin? what use does it have for it? is this a sign that consumerism is moving from humans to chickens - a form of reverse bird flu? or is it evidence that the soul exists even after death and resists dispossession of what it considers its own? Such philosophising will enable you to get through the last two drumsticks.

7. Finally get through last two drumsticks. Wash hands and knife thoroughly, they're totally sticky and slimy by this time. Give chicken one last baleful look. Then proceed to make several deep cuts in each drumstick. Resist temptation to attack it with the knife as if you're trying to murder it. Remember, it's already dead, no point giving vent to your anger through violence.

8. Now you're in your element! All you have to deal with is spices and herbs and cooking, and you know how to do that! Smile. Then proceed to marinate the chicken with yoghurt, salt, turmeric, and red chilli powder. Mix thoroughly, make sure drumsticks are properly covered. Let it sit for 2 hours.

9. Slice onions fine, make a paste of ginger, garlic and green chillies. Saute onions in about 3 tablespoonfuls of cooking oil. When they start turning golden, add garlic-ginger-chilli paste and saute a bit more.

10. Add marinated chicken. Let it cook till most of the yoghurt gets absorbed into a thick gravy. Don't worry, it WILL get cooked, and in a reasonable time. Just because it's not a vegetable, that doesn't mean that it's uncookable. You can make the gravy as thick as you like.

11. Remove from fire, garnish with lots of coriander leaves. They taste good, and they look very good too!

12. NOW you can complain to spouse about the tenacity of the chicken in holding onto its skin. He will tell you that there's a right way of doing it. Doesn't matter now, since you've proved that you can do it all on your own, you can take help now. Give sheepish grin, and say 'Yes, I'm sure I was doing it all wrong, you show me next time.'

13. Ladle onto plate, cross fingers hard. Voila, it's cooked! And tastes good too! Look tentatively at spouse. He's licking his fingers. He turns around and says, 'accha banaya hai!' with a big smile. Way to go, baby! You finally cooked chicken! A world of endless possibilities is open to you now...

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Dorm Cooking 00: Prefatory Note

Another new series, and this one marks a fresh approach for the blog. So far I have resisted posting recipes. Like I mentioned in the recent policy update, the blog was envisaged as an attempt to understand food, particularly street food, in its larger social and economic context. Recipes tend to do the very opposite - their purport is to detach preparations from their origins. That is what they achieve when they instruct the Peruvian how to cook Tagine, or the Japanese the right way of making Borscht. Often they suggest how ingredients difficult to procure can be substituted with easily available alternatives; this has the effect of further distancing the dish from its roots.

Of course, it can be argued that recipes serve to bridge cultures; the Tagine recipe may well constitute, say, the Peruvian's sole exposure (no matter how tenuously approximate) to Moroccan Culture. My simple response is that true or not, this has little to do with what the FoodScapes blog has set out to do. It was started with an express remit (namely, to understand food in its context), and publishing recipes goes against this.

However, there does exist a genre of cooking that transcends context, so to speak. And for good measure, it is a genre which we ourselves, my friends and I, regularly add to. Most of us are either grad students or young professionals in academic or semi-academic streams. Money and time are both prized commodities, and yet we appreciate good food as much as, and may even more so than, the next person. In the face of such onerous demands, something or the other has to give way, and usually it is adherence to convention that is a casualty. Let's face it, our cooking is not conventional. It is dictated likely as not by what is convenient, what the local department store is offering a discount on, what is left in the fridge, and whether it'll fit into the microwave. Not conventional, as you can see, but boy, are the results good! I've gained quite a bit of weight in the last year, despite subsisting largely on nuked vegetables.

Incidentally, I find this genre of cooking has garnered some wider recognition even. Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks blog recently featured an article on "dorm food ideas". Apart from anything else, that resolved the issue of what to call this genre. "Grad Student Cooking" didn't sound right somehow, not the least because many friends and potential contributors are no longer students. For that matter, even yours truly might gain a respite from studenthood within this week! "Dorm Cooking" sounds better - it conveys a feeling of haste, a bohemian disregard for conventions, a freewheeling lifestyle marred only by looming deadlines. And let's face it, that's mostly what both grad-student-life and early-professional-life are all about.

This series also represents another break with convention. So far I have been the only one writing on this blog. We start the series, however, with a guest post by Anita Dixit on chicken curry. More posts as and when. As usual, this prefatory note also contains a list of posts in the series.


List of Articles:

1. Chicken Curry for First-Time Cooks of Non-Veggie (guest post by Anita Dixit)
   

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