Handsome Son wants to come for dinner tomorrow, so it was a good time to roast the chicken drumsticks, make a batch of curry powder in case I wanted to curry them.
So I made a new batch of Bill Veach's curry powder Number One. I just go by the proportions he uses, not the weights, since he's talking ounces and I have no scale anyway. But it's easy to proportion it using a tablespoon as the three ounce equivalent, and scaling down from there. I don't want to make as much as he does, so this is fine.
And here it is looking like a gravel pit, but very much more fragrant, wonderful, in fact, reminds you why it's good to cook.
I tried grinding everything together this time, so see if the cinnamon would work better like this, which it did. You're supposed to grind the grindables ahead then stir them together with the powders. But I found that the flavors came out very well with grinding. A few seeds didn't grind down, so I just spooned them out and worked on them with a pestle and mortar.
Duncan, the natural born supervisor, had been just fine, very cool, while he watched me measure, but once I started grinding, and opened the grinder, the smell was wonderful, but not to him. He reared back and gave me a look of total betrayal. You're trying to POISON me!
If you haven't tried making your own curry powder, do. It's fun, and it uses up all those spices you bought one time and really need to try..there are at least ten spices in this mix.
But, curry powder made and stored, since we have the first of the peas in, it might be better to have the roast chicken, with fresh peas and mash. Summer type fare.
And since I had the last of the strawberries here, why not make a nice strawberry sauce and some shortcake to go with it. This is how you get enmeshed in all kinds of cooking activity if you don't look out. The little bowl is the smaller in a set of lovely old McCoy bowls which are designed to look like ears of corn. Had them since HS was a baby, so he will probably like this touch.
So after chicken was roasted and taken out to cool, oven temp pushed up a bit for the shortcake. This was just my same old hot biscuit recipe with a bit of sugar added, and a bit less flour, to make it softer. The smell of the strawberries, with a pinch of fresh lavender in, whoa. Little sprinkle of cornstarch. The sauce will be spooned over the shortcake. The cook tried it this afternoon and pronounced it good.
None of this was planned for today, in fact I was supposed to be excavating in the freezer for last year's iris leaves, with a view to making paper. I did eventually get to that, but that's for Beautiful Metaphor, see here
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