Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Easy to cook. Hard to resist!
The mercury hit 113 F this afternoon*. Ooof.
I’ve been checking out the local ethnic markets. I found a decent Asian market and also a good Indian market. From the Indian market, I couldn’t resist this box of Kat-a-Kat Curry Mix:
Now with more brains.
In case you’re having trouble reading it, the box says, “Mix for stir fried chops, brain, heart & kidneys,” and the back of the box does indeed say, “Easy to cook. Hard to resist!”
You can buy it here, and they have a recipe, too, which calls for (among other things) 2 goat kidneys, 1 goat heart, 2 goat brains, and 3 mutton chops. I guess you’re out of luck if you only have one goat to slaughter — either that, or you’ll have to do with less brains. Sigh.
I’m going to make the Wimp’s Version, which substitutes chicken thighs for . . . well, for everything. Thighs aren’t too challenging. I’ll boil some potatoes and add those in, and we can pretend they’re brains.
I’ll keep you posted.
D.
*According to Karen, formally, the temps are checked in the shade. So it only maxed out at around 104 today. Does it make any sense to check it in the shade, when we drive, walk, etc. under the beating sun?
It was good. Really good.
I peeled and cubed one russet potato, boiled it, and used the cubes in my recipe (I added it at the beginning, along with the thighs). I chopped three large boneless chicken thighs and that was the only meat in the dish. For the water, I used 1/2 cup of the potato water. I scaled back on everything else, and I only used about two tablespoons of the package spice mixture.
The balance between “sweet” spices and hot spices is excellent. The dish was flavorful, and a good deal different from the usual range of Indian restaurant curries. The potatoes did a good job thickening the sauce. I think this spice mix would work well with any meat, and I’m tempted to try the dish with prawns instead of chicken (but what to do about the potatoes? Prawns and potatoes is a bit weird, don’t you think?)
Overall, a fortunate discovery.
Not a clue – don’t much care for prawns, too delicate a taste for my jaded taste buds. Put spicy sauce on the damn things and they’re just mystery meat to me.
As for the temperature: How, (he asks) are you going to measure it out of the shade with a thermometer (the “mercury”, as you put it…). If you put a thermometer out in the sun, you’re not measuring air temperature any more, but the temperature of the thermometer itself as it soaks up the sun’s rays and heats up well above air temperature!
Our local weather bureau site gives, as well as the standardized shade temperature, an “Apparent temperature” estimate which mathematically takes into account the humidity, wind speed etc… to give you an idea of whether it will “feel” subjectively hotter or colder than the actual measured temperature. Maybe that’s the figure you want.
Yes,it makes sense because the testing equipment can collect/conduct additional heat from the sun and make the readings waaaay off. Like your car hood or a sidewalk feels a LOT hotter sitting in the sun than whatever an official weather temp might be, the same thing would happen. So, weather folks measure the temp of the air, not a surface. To do that, the measuring device has to be protected from sun and cooling wind (like when they do wind chill in midwestern/northern winters).
Gotcha. Yes, that makes sense. But we still need a metric which relates to the ability to fry an egg on the surface of my head.