So, as you know, I am sick.
Again. For, I swear, the tenth month straight. I guess that's what 9 months straight without a single full night of sleep...and a baby in daycare will do to you.
So this week, I have hardly been eating, nevermind cooking anything. But I watched Michael forage for dinner tonight, grazing on this and that, and it struck me that that pretty much sums up how we've been cooking recently. We tend to have a lot of remnants of things. It seems like we cook a big dish and then one or the both of us get sick so it takes forever to polish off the leftovers. And then, of course, I know this is breaking news, but Millie doesn't eat a huge amount, so it's up to us to clean her plate.
Our fridge right now is the perfect expression of that: A Lot of Just a Little Left. There's the array of slightly nibbled fruits and veggies from Millie's meals. It's like Goldilocks comes over and takes a tiny bite out of everything & leaves the rest. She grazes on a wide variety of fruits & veggies (and a little chicken & dairy these days), but, obviously, doesn't finish a whole anything. Often we'll just make a big batch of something for her - steamed pears, butternut squash, blueberries, peas - and then freeze the rest. But when you've got half of one apple, two thirds of one banana, and, the most problematic, half an avocado, it's usually use or lose that night. Tonight, Michael had the remaining half of her avocado on top of scrambled eggs with salsa & toast. The only thing in our fridge besides half of every fruit and veggie from acorn squash through zucchini is an almost-gone thing of chicken curry I'd made last weekend. (And, especially since I've not been eating much the past couple of days, Michael's sick of having to bear the brunt of that).
I have been on a months-long quest to find a great chicken curry slow cooker recipe. I think the slow cooker has got to be the perfect vehicle, giving it time to develop flavor while not requiring me to babysit. But, sadly, I have yet to find one that meets my expectations. I've tried all four of the recipes in ATK's Slow Cooker Revolution, one of them at least twice, and so far, I still haven't found one that's just right. Some produced a very strange texture to the curry - sort of grainy, I guess? (Which I attribute to the tapioca they request that you add, and I recall thinking, "Alright. This is weird. But who knows? Maybe it works!" Nope.) One was downright watery. Now I'm no expert, but I'm gonna go ahead and wager that's a result of the 2 cups of water they request that you dump in the slow cooker with everything else. Anyone ready for some watered down chicken stew with a hint of curry in the background? And I mean, way, WAY in the background?
I swear, some of ATK's recipes are clever, useful, and reliable. But others? I want to take them by the ears and shake them, demanding "Did you even TASTE this? Or do you suffer from some taste-bud DEFECT?" I mean, seriously, what is their deal? Are there some exceptional rules of kitchen physics that work only in their special test kitchen and nowhere else?
It's not like I don't know what I want out of my chicken curry. I want Michael's consistently flavorful, slightly spicy chicken curry...just from a slow cooker. And one of the things that I thought was wrong with ATK's versions was that they, without exception, rely on curry powder and not curry paste. So when I stumbled on a slow cooker chicken curry recipe in a Woman's Day that used curry paste and didn't ask you to add weird sh*t like tapioca and water?
I'll wait while you formulate your guess as to what happened.
Disappointing. So, yeah, I'm still searching for that great chicken curry slow cooker recipe. And til I find it, I guess we're stuck trying to chew through 3-4 quart leftovers of 'not it' chicken curry.
P.S. - I can hear you judging. No, I don't subscribe to or read Woman's Day. I found that in the condo my 'rents stayed in over the holidays and, after flipping through it, I tore the recipes out. And since I don't have a real recipe this week, I'll leave you with this handy list of cooking tips from Cooking Light.
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