On Saturday 04/05/14 Sue and I held The Great 2014 April Fools Day Backgammon Tournament And Fools Stew Dinner Party! Sue baked some great 'Chai-spiced Shortbread Cookies' and I did a Fools South Indian Vegetable Curry served over a bed of long grain brown rice cooked in boiling tarragon infused distilled water.
It appeared from the recipe (yes, sometimes I do go by a recipe...) that after the vegetables had been chopped up, cooking time would be around half an hour. I wanted the vegetables to simmer in the sauce for a little longer, so I started chopping vegetables and other food prep at 4:00pm with the intent of eating around 7:00pm as planned.
We had a nice side track, as Tim and Cindy brought Austin over for the first time for a short visit. He just marched in, plopped down in front of the 52 Inches of LCD Joy, figured out the controls, and put a movie in. He was all set while I chopped and Sue and I visited with Tim and Cindy.
While we chatted and sipped Chardonnay, I got the stew ingredients into cooking shape. What a wonderful collection of ingredients: cauliflower, sweet potato, onion, carrots, cilantro, spinach, tomatoes, and garbanzo beans all simmered in a rich sauce of garlic, sherry, cumin, coriander, turmeric, coconut milk, curry powder, vegetable broth, white wine, ground black pepper, and some other spices that called out to me.
This whole food prep took far, far longer than I had thought it would. Because I was making so much rice, that whole deal took a long time to finish, and even then I think it could have cooked longer to get little more 'fluffy', though brown rice is different in its consistency to white, basmatti, jasmine, or arborio. As a result, we didn't end up sitting down at the table to eat until after 7:30pm.
I didn't want all of those spices to have made the dish too hot, so I had been pretty careful when adding each component: tasting it and making sure I hadn't added too much. It ended up being tasteful, and everyone enjoyed it. I really didn't think it had the flavor that I had anticipated. I tend to think the coriander and turmeric flattened out the cumin and curry powder. Even during the cooking I had added more curry powder to make sure that flavor came through. I just love curry powder, and the name of the recipe was all about curry. There was a lot of curry in that dish, but even so, it just wasn't quite as flavorful as I would have liked it.
Tim had brought his Blu-ray copy of the 2013 movie Gravity as the movie of the night. We got that started just after 8:00pm, despite all of the cooking delays. And what a stunning movie that was. It's unbelievable that all of those special effects and sets were able to be done for a 100 million dollar budget. But wow! What a tense and exciting movie.
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