When I attended USC, there was a lunch shop across the street called A Taste of India. The fare was hardly haute cuisine, but it was warming, tasty, and very inexpensive for a budget-challenged college student. It was also my first real exposure to food from that region of the world. At the shop, they served a mellow, but delicious yellow dal mixed with spinach and diced tomato. This recipe attempts to recreate that dish, with a slight change in texture.
Okay, I had planned on roasting the chicken with a persimmon glaze. However, there were two major problems with this approach. Problem One: persimmons are delicately flavored and, short of a mild cream or custard sauce, are difficult to pair with other flavors. Even too much sugar or honey seems to destroy the subtlety of the persimmon. Problem Two: fuyu persimmons, the kind I usually buy, don’t really have the texture to make a proper glaze. Imagine trying to make a glaze out of something like partially cooked carrots. (Usually you glaze the carrots themselves, not make a glaze out of them.) Nothing I did, including softening the persimmons via cooking and straining in a sieve, yielded the smoothness you associate with a glaze. Arrowroot might have given me a more shiny or glossy sauce, but without the texture, the whole deal was a bust anyway. So there’s a lesson learned: never, ever try to make a savory sauce out of fuyu persimmons. Hachiya persimmons might do better, but you’d have to use the softest, ripest fruits to avoid the astringency associated with that variety. It’s such a shame; I love persimmons. I was really hoping to bring their deliciousness to a main course.
That said, dinner was far from a bust. The spice rub was good, the chicken was beautifully tender and juicy, and the wilted greens were fabulous—that last bit is the real surprise because I usually find myself saying "meh" to most green side-dishes. Also, spatchcocking a chicken is just plain darn fun.
Occasionally I get the urge to cook what no sane, modern man or woman should ever try. Take today for instance—I thought, "Wouldn’t it be great to make Mom’s Japanese curry, but without the help of roux from a box?" Ha bloody ha-ha. Okay, so maybe starting this the day after the cioppino was not my brightest idea. Starting this after finishing a fish stock, a molten cake, a cioppino, and a pesto while also working on two loaves of bread was truly the pinnacle of brilliant scheduling. But like you, I thought, "I just need to make a roux. How hard could it be?" I’ve made roux thousands of times and killed thousands of roux babies. I eat roux for breakfast (okay, not really). But still!
As a child I ate from a variety of cuisines which reflected the life and travel of my mother and her mother. My grandmother was a typical White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP), famous in the family for her apple pies, her delicious meat-and-potatoes Midwest cuisine, and her generous, welcoming table. She married a missionary of the church and traveled overseas with him to Hokkaidō. There she raised my mother with the help of a Japanese nanny, whom Mom fondly remembers as oba-san. Between my grandmother sharing her apple pies with the locals and, in turn, "oba-san" preparing traditional country-style Japanese meals for the family, my mother grew up in the epicenter of a small cultural exchange. She took this experience with her and traveled to the U.S., France, Spain, Mexico, and other countries, studying language, literature, and, occasionally, new cooking techniques and recipes. Later, she married a third generation Japanese son of Hawaii and adapted some of the recipes for him. I had the pleasure of enjoying the accumulated results descended through the line of women in my family.
Bobby really delivers two more winners with his Bulgur Salad and Tandoori Spiced Chicken Breasts with Grilled Tomato Jam and Herbed Yogurt. The bulgur salad packed a punch with the acidity of lime juice and the brightness of the serrano chile; the grilled tomato jam with balsamic vinegar and saffron took an ordinary dish to above-ordinary levels. The only real flaws were ones of my own making:
I discovered a recipe from Emeril which brought back fond memories of thin sliced beef from KTA in a soy sauce marinade. (The butchers eventually stopped offering the thin slicing service; it’s a time-consuming process to keep the meat and knife sufficiently cold. Continue reading for more commentary on this subject.) I’m not sure I would call the recipe “Korean.” It sounds more like an American bastard child of grilled thin sliced beef teriyaki over sticky white rice and ground pork lettuce wraps with crunchy rice noodles.
Anyway, the only part of the dish I made word-for-word was the chile sauce. For the marinade, I just threw the ingredients together with a “Oh that looks about right.”
A few helpful hints for next time:
Fresh lemongrass stalks at the farmer’s market inspired this attempt at a classic Asian dish. I used Charles Phan’s recipe on Food and Wine as a springboard for whipping together my own creation, which was scaled up and done more or less by taste rather than with measuring instruments.
The Procedure: