I’m writing this on Sunday, not on Tuesday, because I feel the need to write up the recipe before I know for sure if it was fail or win.
My usual recipe for this is Banana Tofu Curry. It’s very good. But, I’d been wondering for some time if it were possible to make it with plantains. (Those big green banana-like fruit that need to be cooked before they’re eaten.)
So on Saturday I bought four plantains, and on Sunday I cracked a coconut I’d bought earlier (cracked two: but one of them seemed off, so I decided not to use it). This part involved much thumping and bashing with my heaviest hammer. Great fun.
And then it turned out I didn’t have any tinned pineapple. Oh, bother. However, I did have a bag of sundried pineapple, which is pretty good.
I’d also cooked about a tin’s worth of chickpeas. Into the slow cooker went:
Chickpeas;
The flesh of one coconut, well-chopped;
A packet of sundried pineapple (100g);
2 tablespoons of hot curry powder;
1 teaspoon of cumin;
1 tin of coconut milk, plus two tins more of water;
1/3 cup cashew nuts;
1/3 cup raisins/sultanas;
4 plantains, sliced.
Overnighted in the slow cooker; added 1/3 cup green peas in the morning, stirred well in, switched slow cooker off, and when the green peas were just cooked (ten minutes or so in the still-hot curry) I tried an experimental spoonful.
The plantains tasted raw as uncooked potatoes, and were similiarly hard to bite into. (The rest of the curry tasted fine.)
Well, persevere is my native city’s motto, and so I put the lid back on to the slow cooker, and last night (Monday) I stirred it up, added half a litre of pineapple juice from a carton (the curry was awfully dry) and put the cooker on high for an hour and then to low for the rest of the night.
Still, this morning: the plantain doesn’t seem very cooked. (I’d only ever eaten plantain as plantain chips, and so I’d wondered if I should fry it before adding it to the curry, but according to this you can cook plantain by boiling.) While I may try it again this evening, I think on the whole I should admit to this as one of my failures…
Oh well. Broccoli-pea soup with smoked garlic for dinner tonight. Recipe next week: it’s the second time I’ve made it, and so far it has definitely not been one of my failures.
Jesurgislac's Journal 
I would guess that they weren’t ripe enough yet. I cook plantains two ways; as tostones (not quite ripe plantains sliced and fried for a fried-potato kind of texture) or maduros (very ripe plantains sliced and fried at lower heat for a softer sweeter fried-banana-y kind of texture). For maduros, the plantains have to be so black they look like they’re rotten before you peel them, and even for tostones, they have to be getting pretty black.
If you were cooking your plantains while they were still bright green, that might have been the problem.
Comment by LizardBreath — April 29, 2009 @ 7:33 pm |
Jesurgislac-
Please write another post…the mention of pineapple right at the top is bothering my tastebuds at the mere thought! 😉
Comment by Mike Lovell — May 4, 2009 @ 4:06 pm |
Never been much of a fan of the curry. Just a bit too warm for my taste.
Comment by Jay Burns — May 4, 2009 @ 10:24 pm |
I think Jesurgislac is leaving the post up here just to bother me, and has changed the blogging to another page!!!! LOL
Comment by Mike Lovell — May 12, 2009 @ 2:45 pm |
Off topic, so I decided to post here on what I assume is a dead thread. Anyway, I just typed a long reply to your reply to me on the Memorial Day thread at ObiWi, only to find that once again, for some weird reason, I can’t post there. So here’s the reply. I’ll try there again later, but if it’s like it was last time, I won’t be able to post for several days or maybe longer.—-
Jes–I mostly agree with that. The last part is a bit too harsh–I’d want to phrase it so that it explicitly acknowledges that nonetheless, there are people in the military with moral courage.
As I know you agree, we all knew one who had every sort of courage. Not everyone with moral courage will necessarily arrive at the same conclusions on what is right in a given situation. But I agree that the current American ideal is a soldier who obeys orders and it’s a little odd to expect soldiers to participate without question in illegal wars, but to draw the line at bombing civilians or at torturing prisoners (the popular place to draw it these days).
And I don’t expect honest recruiting ads in the US. But that’s because I don’t expect much honesty in public life in the US. Whether you could have honest recruiting ads in other countries I don’t know. You probably could in a country which only uses its military for legitimate defensive purposes.
But this is the good ole USA, and so the target audience for recruitment ads is being treated exactly the same way that corporations treat their target audiences when they sell cars or soft drinks or cigarettes (to the extent that they are allowed to advertise for the last one). Now isn’t this a great way for a democracy to instill faith in the democratic process amongst its future soldiers?
If we’re going to have a government which “sells” military service with these ads, there should be a legal requirement exactly like there is for the ads for the prescription drugs, where they list all the side effects and drawbacks. Volunteers might end up dead, or crippled or psychologically damaged. You might be sent to wars on false pretexts and be involved in killing people who posed no threat to the US or anyone else. Now historically (as Gary pointed out earlier) the majority of US casualties occurred in what most would consider “just wars”, but that’s because when the US does do a war by choice, we generally pick on countries much weaker than ourselves. Still, in recent decades the US has started two major wars by choice, so volunteers encumbered by a conscience should keep that in mind, since once you join you are not allowed to pick and choose the conflicts in which you will participate. Leave your conscience on that point at the door.
So ask your local military recruiter if the military might be right for you.
Comment by Donald Johnson — May 29, 2009 @ 2:51 pm |
Hi Donald – You’ll probably be able to post this comment in an hour or so: I’ve found that the temporary blockages never seem to last much longer than that.
No, the UK recruitment ads for soldiers are no better, really. As others have noted, the impression you get from viewing them is that joining the military means getting to have a fun time on an Outward Bound course. (There was a popular ad for the military in the 1970s which got parodied in a much more popular t-shirt; “Join the Army. Go to interesting places, meet interesting people, and kill them.” I barely remember the ad: I think it must have got withdrawn in a hurry after it was clear the parody was spreading much faster.)
Comment by Jesurgislac — May 29, 2009 @ 5:06 pm |
Still can’t post at ObiWi. I’m guessing it’ll stay that way for awhile, like it did a couple of weeks ago.
The military is just a sacred cow in the US, for liberals as much as conservatives, apparently. I think this started during the Reagan era, but public attitudes at that point were still mixed–the TV show MASH was on then and allowing for the fact that it was a sitcom and silly and not to be taken too seriously, I thought they treated the military about right. They treated it like it was any other bureaucracy, except very well armed, with a mixture of good people and assholes at every level, though the further up the chain of command you went the higher the percentage of assholes. The show was antiwar, but it didn’t demonize soldiers. It also didn’t act as though wearing a uniform turned a person into a knight in shining armor. And the heroes of the show were the people who weren’t afraid to subvert military discipline when it conflicted with basic human decency. But the Reagan era is also when we had “Rambo” and “Top Gun” and the gung ho attitude seems to have won out in popular culture.
Nowadays you hear people unselfconsciously using the word warriors” to refer to the troops, which has a militaristic ring to it (or alternatively, a Conan the barbarian sound). It’s bizarre.
I’ve heard the “meet interesting people and kill them” joke. Didn’t know it was a parody of an actual recruiting ad.
Comment by Donald Johnson — May 29, 2009 @ 10:18 pm |