I hadn’t blogged
for an eon and look at me! Thrice in three days ... but important things are
happening to me. My Australian adventure is clearly going to be one big
success!
To carry on where
I left off. With a table full of fresh cooking ingredients. The huge prawns,
the sweet cut of silverside and (nearly) all the ingredients with which to attempt my
biggest culinary challenge in decades: could I approximate Asman’s wondrous
chole palak?
The prawns didn’t
require any skill. They’d be easiest. And the silverside I do know how to cook,
but I’d forgotten peppercorns and treacle for my nascent larder. The chole
palak. Perhaps too tricky for a novice?
Ummm. Take a large glass of Redlands Emily. And what the hell, go for
broke.
Not the rightest way, with all sorts of spices
and herbs like you see on Indian cooking programmes. A simplified version
(thank you, Paulie!). Olive oil, onion, garlic, tomato, curry paste … zizzle …
in pot. Add spinach. Or such spinach as you can get in Australia. (National
disaster! Real spinach doesn’t grow here!) Some veggie stock. Reduce the baby spinach.
Hope it doesn’t stick. Perhaps more stock. Oooops. Most of the packet went in.
(Note: buy a kitchen jug). Wait till the spinach semi-disappears then add one tin
of drained chick-peas and half a packet of cumin. Wish I’d remembered the
ginger. Oh well, next time. It smells good, but it looks more like soup than
chole palak!
Result: taste
8/10, technique 4/10, maybe 5. I will do better. Less stock, more spinach, more
spices. But hey! I’ve started! First time I’ve done anything more complex than
fry a black sausage in decades! And it was really tasty. Well, done Kurt!
To bed, after
finishing the bottle, in a proud frame of mind, at 8pm. To awaken at 5am with
the first intimations of dawn sneaking through my bedroom patio doors … may as
well get up and see how the Monte Carlo tennis has gone while I’ve been asleep
…
I didn’t really
intend to pass another milestone before breakfast, but, well … Last night, at the cocktail hour, as I
strolled through the delightful shrubbery at my door, glass in hand, I passed
the complex’s swimming pool. Now, I am not a pool lad. I am the man who
scotched the plan to build a pool at my apartment building (of which I owned 3/9ths, so
my votes made a difference) in France. But I paused to look at young Joe from
Armidale enjoying himself in the water, and to chat to his dad …
And this morning I
thought … I’ve got a pair of badehose. And my shower is not satisfying yet.
Could I … Shall I …
Well, the badehose
(hintful Xmas gift from Paulie!) haven't been in the water since my sauna and
massage days at Holmes Place, Berlin. But see, they’re wet! And out drying. I
did it!
It was a shock. I
mean, absolutely nothing is cold round here. I expected the water, even in the
pre-sun hours, to be luke-warm. No way. As I wobbled carefully down the step I
gradually froze: from toes to testicles to tummy to tits … and then I held my
breath and went under. Arrrgh! If I had any, my eyebrows would have glaciated.
I did a brief
version of my Holmes Place water exercises, then scurried into the slightly
warm spa-pool and set the waves going full-blast as small Joe arrived for an
early morning dip. I warned him about the brass-monkey water, but in he went …
Well, the morning
is passing gently – I can hear Mr Whippy’s ‘Greensleeves’ (why?) tinkling under
my balcony, in the soft sunshine -- and
it’s time to face another challenge. A microwave machine. Wendy does the
microwaving (and, of course, the cooking!) at Gerolstein. The second half of my
chole palak is brimming the plate, does it overflow? Oh well, only one way to
find out, I imagine … here goes!
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