Molee at the Rowley’s!

I was invited to cook for three wonderful foodies on 19th April, Sunday: Sharon, Donna, and Becky (the Rowley). Becky has beautiful old house and a finely equipped kitchen. You can tell she is a foodie, by the pots and utensils she owns! She has a rambunctious bat-faced puppy, cheeky parrots and two extremely large and serious tortoises. Donna asked if I had seen the tortoises and I said “Where? where?” and was straining my eyes looking for the tiny elusive creatures in the backyard, only to find they were two humongous mountains under my very nose. Big shock!
Main course was Fish Molee, a light Kerela-style stew with Dill Rice, Green Beans stir fry, Pappadum and chutneys, finished up with Assam Tea and Mango Ice cream (Heck no! I did not make the ice cream. I am so not a dessert person. To eat - yes, to make – no). More about recipes and ingredients in next post. Saddest thing is I went and deleted the photos of this session from the camera by mistake before I had downloaded them on to the computer. Dang! Becky says she will send me some that she took. Will update when I receive. Here is the menu for now.

Cooking with Shona – as described by Anitra

Shona asked me to write a few words about the first day we spent cooking at her place. I say here and now that there are no few words to describe it; one could use a multitude of words and still not be precise. But having to render it down to a few words, I would pick would be spice, smell, taste. There is no such thing as brevity when cooking with Shona.

Most of us are doing good to have a spice rack, our Chef Wannabe, has Cabinets (yes that is plural), chock-full of spices. I am not talking about the powdered cinnamon, nutmeg, paprika… canned varieties that I grew up on; I'm talking about jar after jar of stuff like star anise, black cardamom, Japan chili peppers. Even commonplace seasonings, come an extraordinary forms: not cinnamon, but cinnamon bark; nutmeg shows up as the whole nuts; salt is sea salt. If you've ever seen one of these old movies of a witch's reagent shelves then picture that's our Shona spice pantry. And she knows how to use them all!

Just you try asking her for a recipe; she will comply oh so nicely, saying it's just a cup of this, teaspoon of that, a pinch of the other. However, when she puts it together in the precise measurements she first gave you she will add a handful more this, just a half cup extra of that, a few additional shakes of the other and something so far out in left-field, that wasn't in the original recipe, it leaves you wondering just what were we making. For example:
a cilantro mint sauce for Shona’s illustrious “Katti Rolls”, we start off with a bunch of fresh cilantro from the Asian market, a bundle of mint, a lemon and sour cream. When we started cooking Shona remembered she had some cilantro in the fridge to finish off, so we added it in; we blended it in with the mint and added the lemon juice (you got to see how Shona squeezes a lemon); I digress. She decides not to use the sour cream, but instead, yogurt; I can’t remember why. The yogurt isn't put in by any precise measurement, but by gosh and by golly. “It needs a little more lemon and a pinch of sugar” AND PREST-O CHANGE-O AND ALEC-KA-ZAM! Cilantro mint sauce, that was so delicious I was sampling it out of the container on the drive home with my bare finger.
But I tried making it at home on my own, and it just didn't have the same pizzazz.


-------Anitra