from tragedy to triumph

If I had known it was going to go so well, I would have taken pictures of tonight's whipped-up dinner. The challenge: create a non-spicy dish that Dad could eat (he loves spicy food, but can't handle too much spiciness), using spare beef and other leftover ingredients.

The beef had already been shredded, and Mom had some of her saesongi mushrooms left over from a previous preparation. We also had milk, butter, sour cream, and a half-brick of cream cheese, so I thought to myself: Stroganoff.

Initial prep went well; I heated butter, dumped in the shrooms (some of which had to be cut down to size; saesongi are huge and meaty), added some salt and pepper, then threw in the shredded beef. A few minutes later, I tossed in every bit of creaminess I could find, but when I tasted the mix, something didn't seem quite right. The beef, which had been prepped for a different dish, was too conspicuous; the mix wasn't melding into Stroganoff. A whisper from the Force made me turn around, and I found myself staring at a large bottle of powdered curry. I ladled out a tiny bit of the faux-ganoff into a plastic container, added a bit of curry, tasted the result, and... jackpot.

After that, it was a matter of finding veggies to accompany the curry. I had some dried onion on hand, and we had eggplant, green bell peppers, and carrots. The green peppers, watery little weasels that they are, went right into the faux-ganoff, where I knew they'd soften up fairly quickly. I decided to boil the carrots into submission because time was short, and after I'd finished chopping the eggplant up, I threw it into the water as well. A few minutes later, I drained the mess and tossed it into the faux-ganoff, which was shaping up into a nice curried beef dish, albeit an unconventional one. Chicken or shrimp would have been nicer, but I had to work with what I had.

In the end, it came down to the taste test, with my poor family as the lab rats. My brother David had come over, so he was part of the test as well. We set the table downstairs in front of the TV; I brought down a huge pot of reheated rice, and Dad and David brought down drinks and a large bowl of kimchi (kimchi goes very well with most curry dishes). I went up and got the curry, brought it down, and asked everyone how much they wanted, warning them that this was an experimental dish.

As it turned out, everyone ate everything, except poor David, into whose bowl I had dumped an inordinate amount of food. Mom and Dad both ended up having seconds, and I ate David's leftovers. David, for his part, proclaimed the dish "good."

So the beef curry passed muster. It wasn't a true curry by anyone's measure, but the curry powder is what made a previously nonsensical dish into something both sensible and edible. What a relief.


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