One day, four dishes

Sometimes I get a little overzealous in my food planning. For this time, I was preparing to go out of town few a few days, so I wanted to leave food for Josh to eat and also have some low-maintenance food ready to go for the first couple days when I expected to be working late.

We started off with lunch at Peter Chang's, ordering some of our favorites.

In the bottom right position is braised fish in chili oil which comes in a large bowl layered first with Chinese cabbage, then the braised fish, swimming in red chili oil and then topped with sichuan peppercorns. It's so spicy, but also so flavorful. It's one of the spiciest dishes I crave.

Next to that is a tofu skin roll that's sliced up for serving and served cold. They changed the preparation around recently so it comes topped with garlic, probably some ginger, scallions, and soy sauce. I really enjoy this app and it keeps really well as a snack at home.

Lastly, we had mapo dofu. Spicy, porky, dofu-y. This was a really great lunch. Every time I see the picture, I want to go there for my next meal.

I thought that smoking some pork for Josh would leave him with a good amount of food while I was gone. We found a Heritage Farms pork "roast" (it was pretty small) and defrosted it. Then I marinated it, tied it up, and mopped it a bit. Then I put it over low heat on the Egg with some wet wood chips for smoke.

It was an interesting lesson that even though the pork was about 1/3 the size of my recipe, it still took about as long to cook -- six hours. We only did it for about four hours that day and then wrapped it in foil and put it into the oven with a bit of water in the pan for the next few days until it was completely done.

This one turned out better than the last in that it was able to get that crisp and smoky look. The outside was a bit dry, but inside, it was moist and delicious. Well, I didn't actually get to eat any, but that's what Josh said.

I also made a pot of chili which is always low maintenance but still takes a while to make. I started off with dried organic kidney, navy, and pinto beans and let them cook. They always take a long time. Then I added in bacon fat, onions, some Riverview ground beef, two Heinekens, and my spices. Then I let it cook for a few hours. Top with cheddar cheese and sour cream. Yum.

And then this is where my planning went awry. I had been watching Cooking Channel earlier and watched the making of a coconut fish curry that looked easy and good. And then I wanted to make something with lamb, and landed on rogan josh.

So for the rogan josh, I started off with my selection of spices. You saute those in oil first to bring out the flavors.

Then you add onions, the lamb, more spices. And enough water to cover.

You let that cook down and then serve!

It turned out okay. In retrospect, I probably have a few Madhur Jaffrey recipes I should have used instead...

I also did my fish curry which seemed like it would come together pretty quickly. Meanwhile, I was stressing out about cooking basmati rice, which all the posts online seemed to indicate took as much care and specific cooking process as risotto. In the end, I think we should have just tossed it into the rice cooker and called it a day.

The sauce for this is pretty simple. You start off sauteing the spices in oil, then adding the onions, the coconut milk mixture, and the fish. This recipe had caused some runaround since we needed curry leaves and went to a couple stores without finding it until I remember the Cherians nearby. Score!

Tah-dah! Overall, I thought this was the most successful. The curry leaves really did make the dish, adding a combination of flavors that's hard to pin down.

Dinner that night with my two curries anchored by some overly moist basmati.