If you'd like, play the following song and scroll down for more vendaloo news. Visit Molly and tell her thanks for, not only getting this song stuck in my head, but also for this attempt I'm making to lodge it even more in your head. If you aren't sure what the hell I'm talking about then by all means listen to the song. It's great.
Please feel free, if you think you know better, to tell me in the comments what a vedaloo actually should be. Keep in mind that I'm making it from our beloved friend Ms. Joy.
Vinegar, olive oil, garlic, ginger, curry powder, mustard seeds, cumin, cardamom, cloves, crushed red pepper all go into the blender and come out a thick and smelly and yellow mess. It then gets tossed with two pounds of pork, cut into one inch cubes, for one to eight hours. When you're ready too cook the pork you cook some sliced onions in a pot, add your pork, a can of diced tomatoes and a cinnomon stick. Cook it till the pork is at is tastiest, stir in some more mustard seeds, let it thicken and add some cilantro.
So, even with my almost need to follow a recipe at least the first time, I used rice vinegar though the recipe called for white wine. The (preferably black) that followed each mention of mustard seeds translated to brown being the darkest mustard seed we had, and I wasn't going all the way to the coop for mustard seeds. And instead of pork loin or shoulder as requested I went with a cheaper cut thinking the stewing would work fine on this particular cut, and all the loins and/or shoulders were twice as big as I needed. Also I forgot to add the cilantro at the end, which I realized as I was finishing eating and wondering how I could make it better. Finally, we didn't have the rice we should have had, and I used sushi rice. I just didn't like it in this.
What made it better? Coconut milk and not sushi rice and not forgetting the cilantro. After I looked a little more I realized that we did indeed have a long grain white rice, which was better than sushi rice but not nearly as perfect for this as jasmine rice, which we don't currently have.
I'm sure the addition of coconut milk made is so not vendaloo anymore, and I really don't care. And that's the end of of this round. One begs me to make vendaloo again and to write about it again. That's how these things go. But really, we just can't know. I'll definitely mess around with curries, but will I attempt the vendaloo again? Actually yes, because the more I think about it the more I really do care. What is this dish, this vendaloo? I'm afraid I might have to actually bother looking around. I mean, it has a song not not about it for fuck sakes.
