Dearest Rachel –
And now, a slight break from the heaviness of dealing with Dad’s declining health and the craziness of abruptly moving him back home from rehab. There will be time to go over that later today – or maybe tomorrow, depending on whether, and when, I have time – but every now and again, there has to be a few notes of kitchen jazz, as I try to prep something for us boys to eat rather than always settling on one restaurant or another to carry out from.
After putting together a doria from that box of 100-yen-store sauce mix a couple months ago, Daniel has been asking for us to try a similar effort, but using curry as a base rather than tomato sauce. Up until now, I hadn’t really put much thought about it, although I’d taken the opportunity to assemble most of the ingredients (particularly some ground beef – which we don’t use nearly as often as when you were around and cooking for the three of us – and curry roux blocks). But since we’re leaving town for the better part of a month, and we have this stuff in the refrigerator and freezer, I thought we might as well use it up and have done with it.
Now, I’ve heard and seen memes of people complaining about how cooking blogs will have paragraphs of background description before getting to the actual meat, if you will, of a recipe. Thankfully, you know better than that about me; this isn’t a cooking blog in general, so I’m under no obligation to please those sort of people by getting to the heart of “here’s what you need and here’s how you do this.” In fact, I’d say this was done completely wrong almost from start to finish, so no one needs to look at this as a recipe to begin with. But I think it still made for an interesting story.
Let me start with the fact that, while I was over at Dad’s bedside one last time, I had trouble getting in touch with Daniel, to tell him to get the meat out of the freezer for the evening’s dinner. This isn’t that unusual, you might know; he’s not always checking his phone compulsively, which can be a virtue for politeness sake (although often, this is because he’s staring at his computer, which isn’t exactly an improvement), but it makes it challenging to contact him remotely. Eventually, I decided to make the request in the chat that included Logan, and he took care of it during one of his breaks.
It then occurred to me that I ought to fatten up the curry layer with some of the potatoes we’d gotten from an erroneous delivery some months ago. I could have sworn there were O’Brian potatoes in that receipt, but by asking Daniel to look for and thaw those, all I wound up doing was confusing and puzzling him. I’m still sure we had some at some point in the recent past, but not anymore. So yeah, this thing wasn’t off to the best start right from the get-go, so anyone reading over my shoulder really ought not to imitate my process as if they were instructions, anyway.
The good news is that, after consulting with CoPilot (in lieu of any instruction manual for the machine that we might have had, once upon a time), I discovered for the first time that this isn’t a rice cooker that you start up and absolutely do not touch. We could open it up and add water if we needed, and stir it around to mix the water in. As a result, this is probably the first batch I’ve ever made that didn’t wind up scorching a few grains in the process. I’ll have to remember that in future.
But since that delayed getting the rice together before the meat and curry mixture, I decided to put the meat in the baking dish first, as if I was making some Japanese version of a shepherd’s pie. Call it a “salaryman’s pie,” if you will – although, as Daniel pointed out, it was a bit more work than a salaryman (or his wife) would go through, especially when he could get something more to his liking from the local conbini that was quicker to put together (or already pre-made as ready to eat, like a Famichikki).
Taste-wise, though, it really did resemble a shepherd’s pie. Even the curry flavor was sufficiently muted (well, it was the mild stuff, since we’d gotten it originally to make curry toast, a la our visit to Komeda Coffee) that it rather tasted like the roux in a pot pie or a shepherd’s pie. So I figured I’d tell you about it, all the way down to the misadventures in putting it together, to say we rather enjoyed it – although thanks to it, and the several helpings I had to polish it off, I’m getting dangerously close to the two-thirty line again. I’ll have to get back to exercising soon, particularly once I’m on the ship next week.
For now, though, I’m going to have to get going, as today’s going to be busier than most. Keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me well; I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 