Cooking
It’s a meat-sauce mashup of Chinese, Korean and Italian cuisine, sweet-salty and fiery all at once, with tangles of braised kale and chewy rice cakes.
Good morning. We hit Del Fiore in Rocky Point for late-morning sandwiches, Italian subs from the northeastern reaches of Brookhaven on Long Island, then pushed west along the Washington Spy Trail toward Port Jefferson, Setauket, Nissequogue, thinking about cooking all the way.
This is the way of the weekends now, when daylight’s fleeting, when afternoons pass in what seems like moments. Dinner comes up fast. I want to be prepared.
The debate in my head as I drove: mapo ragù (above) or butter chicken. I learned how to make the first by following the chefs David Chang and Tien Ho, who served it at Momofuku Ssäm Bar on Second Avenue in Manhattan a million years ago. It’s a meat-sauce mashup of Chinese, Korean and Italian cuisine, sweet-salty and fiery all at once, with tangles of braised kale and plenty of chewy rice cakes to absorb the flavors and fat — an ideal wintertime feast.
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Mapo Ragù
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But that butter chicken’s no slouch on a Saturday night in December. It’s worth considering, too. The recipe is one that Amandeep Sharma, a line cook at the Melbourne restaurant Attica, served as a staff meal: a curry of tomatoes, butter and chicken thighs scented with onions, ginger, garam masala, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon — Delhi on a plate. I eat it alongside a bowl of basmati rice and think about summer there in Ripponlea, with chattering lorikeets flapping around in the garden outside the restaurant, the whole magical vibe of urban Australia.
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