Currying favour (or something like that)

Recently I've been getting in to Indian food, partly because of the sheer amount that you're served whenever you go out to most Indian restaurants. I could stuff myself with a £15 meal from the one on the main road in Cupar and hardly have to bother eating for the next week. The only trouble with food from that part of the world is that I find most of it tremendously overspiced - it seems I have rather girly tastebuds and I always have to choose a dish from the spice level marked "Wimpy".

So when the time came to decide what to cook for dinner last night, I decided on curry. I had bought a tin of the chicken variety during the weekend, but I found that it was marked as "Medium" spice, and from experience it seems that this is what manufacturers put on their tins when they don't really know the spice level. A tin marked "Medium" can be anything of a wide range of heat levels from "mildly tingly" to "the core of the sun". I didn't have any rice on hand either, and I felt it would be somehow inappropriate to use it with pasta.

In one of my brilliant moments, I therefore decided to cook chicken fricasse (which has been a favourite of mine for as long as I can remember) but with curry powder added in to it. This wasn't quite the travesty it sounds, but looking back I'm not sure why I thought it would solve the rice/pasta problem. The most difficult bit was actually finding the curry powder itself, because the spice cupboard is even worse than the medicine cabinet and has hundreds of empty pre-decimilisation jars and bottles.

I'm not going to list the contents in as great depth as I did for my own cupboard, but the highlights were finding Schwartz bottles that had their weights in ounces on them (and serving instructions in dsp. What's a dsp?), and a jar of ammonium dihydrogen sulphate. I can only assume that this has been left there since the Cold War and is kept on hand in the spice cupboard in the event that we have to poison ourselves to prevent capture by the Russians.

I eventually found a relatively modern jar of curry powder with no illegal chemicals in it, and added it to the pre-processed fricasse. It took a while (probably several dsp) before anything visible happened to it, and even then it was only turning a slightly yellower shade of beige. The end result was pretty passable, though, and making something from a jar and a tin is undeniably a step up the student culinary ladder from making something from a tin.

Do you think Whitney will let me do the cooking next year?