12 PM rolled around, and, since it's Saturday and I've decided to be a homebody today, I realized I needed to cook lunch for myself – there's no convenient cafeteria, here, to vist at 12:30 promptly, with it's reliable supply of seaweed soup, rice, kimchi, etc.
I didn't really have much to work with. I put some rice in my rice cooker, and decided to stir fry some vegetables. But all I had was one green pepper, 2 mushrooms, and plenty of delicious onions. I chopped them up and threw them in my fry pan. I gurgled some cooking oil, and added some basil and chopped garlic, a dash of soy sauce (instead of salt, that's what I tend to use), and then I had an inspiration.
I was looking at some fat, juicy apples. And I had some rather weird, organic, Korean yoghurt that some students had bequeathed on me after a field trip to a dairy last week. And I thought – aha! – curry.
I chopped up an apple. I found my raisins (that I sometimes nibble on for a desert type thing). But the key was that although I had no curry powder, I had all the essentials for making my own: tumeric (dump, dump, dump), powdered coriander (dump, dump), black pepper (dash, dash), ground clove (dash), Korean red pepper powder (dump). That makes a passable curry – I've done it before.
Then, in an added inspiration, I looked at the dry-looking development in the fry pan, and thought to moisten it with a half-cup of orange juice. Curry is most delicious when it's slightly sweet (with e.g. fruit), but spicy as heck. And so then, after simmering this combo for a while, I added some of the yoghurt, making it a deep goldenish brown colored glop, and stirred it all together. And put it over my rice.
It was the most delicious freaking curry I've had in ages! Certainly better than the pasty, bland Korean and/or Japanese styles I've gotten used to. And spicy as heck! I'm sweating. Sweat. Sweat.
I experiment a lot in the kitchen. But I tend not to talk about the failures. This was defnitely no failure. Yay. ^_^
