And Now For Something Quite Different

I think that I have eaten curry three times. Once at a place called Cedars which was alright but nothing special - and apparently the servers don't get the tips the management does (just for that I would like to see them put out of business) and the other two times at the Bombay Grill which is good place to go eat food that you have absolutely no idea how to make - but it is definitely not the height of Indian cuisine. Anyways, for the longest time I have been telling myself (and possibly others) that I would one day begin collecting and mixing my own spices and grind my own curry powder. Well? "Can your hearts stand the shocking facts" about somebody who has barely eaten curry - grinding his own?

My foray started at Pike and Western, which is both a good and bad thing. Pike is a good market because I can get a ton of neat stuff that is quite difficult to find elsewhere; it is bad because I will invariably spend more money than I should. The first stop was to get fresh curry leaves which I found at a little store called The Souk which is located next to the first Starbucks Coffee house. After than I went down to the The Spanish Table and picked up some olive oil since I had run out. Next I went to World Spice Merchants where I obtained fenugreek seed & leaf, nigella seed, and green cardamom pods. Finally I went to Market Spice which has not quite as large a selection of spices as World Spice but does boast a dramatic selection of teas and coffees as well as convenient containers for storing things in at reasonable prices - which is what I got. After I was done with Pike I took a short walk down to City Kitchen and picked up a granite mortar and pestle with which to grind my spices. The shopping spree was finally concluded after a visit to The Greenwood Market where I could buy the actual ingredients to use the spices on. Then the fun began.

At home I read several combination's for curry mixes before deciding to just get some stuff out and see what happened. The smell of curry leaves is interesting; not something that I am entirely entranced by like everyone else, I guess. I selected a mixture of: fenugreek seeds, nigella seeds, cloves, cinnamon, fennel seeds, coriander, green cardamom, curry leaves, red chili peppers, and cumin. First I toasted everything together in a dry skillet and then I transferred it into the mortar - as you can see. The only question left was how to make use of it. So, it being about 2 o'clock in the morning I just threw some rice into a pot with a liberal amount of the powder and proceeded to fill the entire house with the lingering smell of my curry. When the rice was finished I added in the fenugreek leaf, which is an aromatic that is best added at the end of the dish as a finish lest it lose its qualities in the cooking process. I was relatively impressed with how it turned out, even though I would by no means call it fantastic. The curry was merely a foray into spices that I don't understand yet - and even with my first use I can already generate and idea about the proportion of major and minor flavor factors in future mixes that I would never have thought reasonable previously.

On a brief aside, I made scrambled eggs with tomato, leek and the curry the next morning and it turned out quite well.