Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 1

Yesterday[1] was what we call a “bad baby day”. Not that Benjamin was bad – he really is just about the greatest baby ever - but, as I said the other day, he can make it really, really difficult for me to get anything done. Here's my deal. I have some hard-to-diagnose form of attention deficit disorder. Think of it like having a busted gearbox in my head... if any of you ride bicycles, or use manual transmissions. I need to use analogies that refer to technology in more common use. Anyway, it's a lot of effort for me to get going on something, and once I am going - even going on a thing I enjoy, like writing this blog - it is effort for me to stay on it if I lose that focus.

Before you say "I know - that's called working, everyone has that problem" the point I'm trying to make is that after a fairly short time trying to focus on something, I start feeling fairly intense physical signs of fatigue - tiredness, headaches, irritability - like I had just gone through fairly intense physical exertion. Once I get focused, I don't have that problem any more... until something shiny catches the corner of my eye, I get distracted, and I start the whole process all over again.

So for me, even more than for most people, trying to work and deal with a baby is really exhausting, because I never get to that comfortable 'clicked in' stage, I'm always in the exhausting 'trying to get focused' stage. Or the 'dealing with a baby' stage, which is also fairly exhausting. Or, worst of all, the 'just got focused and now I'm getting pulled away from what I was focused on' stage - one of the hallmarks of ADD is a paradoxical overfocus. Once you get focused on something, it's really hard to pull yourself away - in fact, just as exhausting as trying to get focused in the first place, and far, far more irritating, because usually it's someone or something else pulling you away... something to focus that irritation at.

So, some days Benjamin and I have a happy rhythm, where I get some work done, spend some time playing with him, and we're both happy. Some days, though, he doesn't really feel like playing in his playpen on his own, or he's fussy because something is bothering him. If I'm smart, on those days, I just give in and spend the day hanging out and reading to him. Some days, though, I'm not smart... and I wind up, as I said, cycling between the three things I mentioned in the last paragraph - trying to focus, trying to unfocus, and dealing with a baby. My brain is generally good for about two hours of this before I have my own meltdown, go out on the balcony and scream so I don't wind up screaming at the baby, and decide I might as well just play video games for the rest of the afternoon as I nurse my headache.

So on this particular day, the last thing I was up for when dinnertime rolled around was a wondrous journey through the mystic realms of kitchen experimentation. I knew what I had - leftover fish from the sushi we had made the other night and leftover rice from the five salt dinner. I knew what I wanted to do with them - add turmeric. I really didn't feel like having to think. So I googled "turmeric salmon" and "turmeric fried rice", clicked a few links, and this is what I wound up with.

http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/1068269-Salmon-with-Garlic-and-Turmeric

http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html

Both of them looked delicious, simple, and used only ingredients that I already had in the house.

This is what it sounds like when I talk. “Hi, I’m Aaron, mi mi mi mi mi, spirit of adventure, mi mi mi, enjoy the journey, mi mi mi. But I'm not gonna, because I'm tired. Meh.” But still, like I said, good and fairly easy recipes. Definitely a few things that were worth keeping an eye on, though.

Zeroth, I'm really bad skinning salmon. I imagine it's pretty easy to get a feel for, if you've got a dozen fillets in a row to practice on... but doing it every once in a while just means that I'm always butchering mangling the fish. (I guess a butcher would be a good one for making proper, precise cuts through a piece of meat, so that word probably doesn't convey what I want it to here.)

First, I really think whoever wrote this recipe didn't actually cook it, at least not in this particular form. Why? Well, here's a hint - try "mixing the salt, turmeric, and garlic in a bowl" yourself. What you'll wind up with, as I did, is a bunch of garlic covered in salt and turmeric. Then, when you go to put it on the fish, what you get is a piece of fish with some spiced garlic bits on it, when what you want is spiced fish. I don't see a way to avoid this, unless you want to use a blender on puree for the garlic, so I recommend garlic powder instead. I guess you could also use the salt and turmeric as a rub, then hit the fish with the garlic.

If you're fairly new to cooking with coconut milk, as I am, you might also run into the second problem I had. This recipe doesn't mention that when you put coconut milk in a pan that you've just been searing something in, things are going to get... exciting. And, to answer your question - yes, by "exciting" I do mean "the coconut milk is going to start boiling and spattering almost immediately." How did you know that was going to happen? You smart.

Well, I didn't, and I panicked. Well, maybe panicked is the wrong word - I'm generally not a panicky type person - but I did go into damage control mode, which meant that to counter what seemed like the immediate danger - the coconut milk burning and ruining my dinner - I did the obvious thing, which was to add some water into the pan. That settled everything down - but it was obvious when we ate the final product that it had been watered down, which I didn't think about at the time. This dish takes much more of its flavor than I expected from the coconut milk, and adding the water tanked the flavor to a much larger extent than I would have expected.

Third - and this is really, really important. I mean REALLY important. If you're using dried Asian peppers in this dish, fish them out before your wife - who never orders Asian food with even a little bit of spice in it, and does not recognize them as adding a lot of flavor to a dish but being burning death if eaten - bites into one.

Seriously - you owe me one for that. Actually, it's aiight - I got your back.

Huh... the last direction in this recipe is to "pour the curry over the fish." Now, there weren't a whole lot of options here, so it's pretty obvious what to do - but I never actually knew that the word "curry" just means "sauce".


So tomorrow, we'll talk fried rice, which is quick becoming on of my favorite dishes to make - I used to throw out a ton of leftover rice, because I hate rice when it gets dried and chunked up. Quick preview: Two things to know about fried rice are that it's really easy to make, and it uses day-old rice. Yum!

 
I need to come up with a good sign-off. "Until next time, keep doing that thing that you like doing so much. No, not that thing, the other one. Yeah, that one. Yay!"

Could probably use some work.



[1] Yesterday being a relative term, now that I've started posting these on a scheduled basis, rather than as soon as I finish them up.