I made the mistake of letting my wife read last week’s Leftovers, in which Lucy wrote about making a chicken dish with a store-bought Madras curry powder.
Of course, my wife thought this sounded like the best thing since sliced naan and asked me to make it.
Of course, this meant I had to make the Madras curry powder from scratch. Which meant collating 14 different spices, toasting them individually and using my spice grinder for the final pulverization.
I also thought this would be a good use of a lot of my spice hoard, some of which I have had since the Clinton administration.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, the resulting chicken curry dish was quite pleasant, but oddly lacking in any heat or strong flavor. At least the riata and brown rice and mango chutney were pretty good.
So now I have two cups worth of bland Madras curry powder. And I am not even going to tell you about the garammasala spice mixture I made.
The moral of this story? Don’t let my wife read Lucy’s offerings.
And you thought I was going to say something like replace your spices before they get dust on their containers.
—LOU
That’s too bad — to go to all that trouble and have bland curry. Maybe just buy the can next time. Oh, and purge all the old spices. If you don’t, next time you use them they will be that much blander.
I almost never buy a whole jar of spice for just that reason. And the jars are usually so much more expensive.
Life is so much better with fresh spices.
—LUCY