The year of slow
Taking a less hurried approach to 2024, sizzling Indian barbecue ideas, and a hot and crunchy popcorn alternative.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter. This edition is by guest writer Perzen Patel (@perzen). It’s lovely to have you here!
It’s that time of the year when strangers on the internet make me jealous with their “words of the year”, a single word that reminds them of everything they want to do or be in 2024. Because choosing a single word to summarise an entire year feels as hard as choosing my last meal.
For the purposes of writing this newsletter, I persisted. Three minutes of reflection in the bathroom while my boys asked me 84 questions from outside, I had my word.
Slow.
As someone who sells curry pastes to make dinners easy, I’ve made it my job to stir together something that is cheap and nutritious, that my children will also eat, and that doesn’t take longer than 20 minutes to put together. My Instagram search tells me I’m borderline addicted to #quickcooking, #15minutemeals and #instantdinners.
So for the first week of embracing “slow”, I couldn’t think of anything except for the slow-cooker languishing on my garage shelf.
We’ve all enjoyed the creamy, smoky dahl makhani I made after months. And my slow-cooked hoisin pork shoulder performed like an index fund investment, helping me make rice bowls, burgers and fried rice. At the pot-luck last weekend, my let’s-call-it-Tuscan bean stew that we scooped up with crisp lettuce shells went down a treat too. But with work starting properly this week, I’ve found myself packing away the slow-cooker again.
I did some more reflection (again in the bathroom) and have come up with three things I plan to try instead to incorporate more “slow” into my kitchen.
Long and slow onions and tomatoes
As an Indian, I use so many onions and tomatoes that I often find myself chopping up onions and opening a can of diced tomatoes before I’ve even decided what I’m cooking.
While I can’t slow-cook all my food, I’m going back to using my weekends to caramelise my onions and cook those tomatoes low and slow. Caramelising onions adds a deep base of flavour of sweet, savoury and extra oomph to curries, stews and my favourite mid-week treat, pies. When it comes to tomatoes, I’ve long known that slow-roasting them in the oven helps mellow their acidity until they are deliciously sweet.
What I didn’t know until recently is that you could do that to canned tomatoes too! While both of these ingredients stay good in the fridge for a week, my plan is to take advantage of the cheap summer prices for both and freeze a bunch of it for my weekday curries. Who knows, maybe I’ll go a step further and then freeze those curries too for an endless supply of yum.
Cooking with family
After seven years of being a mum, I have relatively low standards for what makes me a “good mum”. But one of the dreams I still hold dear is raising boys who love spending time in the kitchen. Problem is, they currently have a mum who swats them away impatiently because it’s faster and less messier if I cook by myself!
But something’s changed this summer with them turning five and seven. We’ve been practising our numbers by counting the chocolate chips for our pancakes and learning to spell by writing the grocery list. Last Friday the boys “made” their own pizzas for pizza night and as I write this, we’ve spent the morning rolling up and freezing spring rolls I can fry for their lunchboxes once school begins. Cooking together is now more fun than it is messy and I’m already dreaming up things we can cook together.
Cooking the unknown
Easy, familiar and healthy often sits at odds with exciting. Which might explain why I’m bored with all the meals I end up cooking. I could make my meals exciting by adding piles of cheese or cream to everything I make like Facebook urges me to constantly. Or, I could stop treating my growing cookbook collection as bedtime reading and actually cook some of the recipes hiding in there.
My challenge to myself this year is to take inspiration from the Instagram creator Jake Dryan (@plantfuture) and take a deep dive into regional Indian food à la Julie & Julia, cooking something new from the recipe books weekly. I’m hoping that not only does it make mealtime easier but it also provides fodder for my weekly essays on Beyond Butter Chicken.
It remains to be seen how many of my slow resolutions I put into practice. What I can say is that a couple weeks into my year of slow, I seem to have reignited my love for tootling around the kitchen, even if I’m not very productive. Maybe this word-of-the-year palaver has some merit after all.
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Weekly bites
Sick of sausages after one too many sausage sizzles over the break? Maybe it’s time for an Indian barbecue instead – where there are never any sausages on the menu. An Indian barbecue meal is spicy, tangy, tender and colourful. Think fiery red and smoky tandoori steak, earthy and bright green hariyali chops or creamy, garlicky malai chicken tikka. The magic is in the marinade and they’re all relatively easy to master.
Part of my training to be a good Indian wife included my mum and grandmum repeatedly reminding me that the way to my husband’s heart would be through food. Turns out that countries do this too when they promote their cuisine to foreign audiences to build or shift their national identity. And it’s called “gastrodiplomacy”. Examples include the Thai foreign ministry negotiating a three-year visa for Thai chefs moving to work in New Zealand and South Korea committing $10 million of funding for South Korean chefs to travel abroad and attend culinary school. Read the intriguing piece on Vittles.
I already knew that #foodtok was so 2022 and last year spent much time scrolling through #eattok and #cheftok to inspire my meals. But the New York Times says that one of the biggest food trends for 2024 is actually #watertok. Essentially millions of people watching millions of other people make ice cubes an art form – adding syrups, powders and petals to their tumblers, and don’t forget the time-stamped, giant, rainbow-themed water bottles. If you need a new strategy for getting in your eight-plus glasses, you now know what to search for!
Snack of the week
Ghee roasted makhana, any Indian food store: There’s not much that constitutes as healthy in the snack aisle of an Indian store. There’s khakra – a type of dehydrated and crispy flavoured roti – which every Indian dietititian will suggest you try and, as I discovered last year when searching the snack aisle for healthy-ish school snacks, there’s makhana. Also known as fox nuts, Euryale ferox, gorgon nuts and phool makhana, makhana are essentially processed lotus seeds that are edible. While makhana is also cultivated in Japan and Russia, 90% of the world’s makhana come from Bihar, India. Indian ingenuity means that of course there’s a makhana curry and a fried makhana taro patty situation, but the easiest and tastiest way to eat makhana is to lightly roast and season them and then pop them into your mouth a la popcorn. While I originally started off roasting these in a wok, I’ve recently discovered you can get the same crispiness by popping them into the air fryer for three minutes. Once they are hot and crunchy, I add in a teaspoon of ghee with some salt and toss it all together and voila, my 4pm snack is ready. 8/10
Mā te wā,
Perzen
