Origins of The Quarantined Cook
Alternatively: how COVID-19 inspired a full meal of South Indian dinner and a Hong Kong-style dessert
As (hopefully) everyone knows now, COVID-19 (coronavirus) is widespread and has reached global pandemic status, sending the world’s population out of the streets and into their homes. Last week, following a flurry of time-sensitive updates and move-out frenzies, MIT sent its students home.
Lucky for me, I don’t live far from campus. Within a few days, however, boredom and hunger got the best of me, so I turned to the Internet for inspiration on how to pass the time. The journey began when I stumbled across a famed South Indian dish: malabar prawn curry (recipe: Jamie Oliver)
My family is vegetarian, so I swapped out prawns for eggs or paneer. Some vegan friends of mine told me they were able to use tofu without any modification to the recipe as well! The gravy is the operational part of this dish, and features a rich coconut milk flavor shored up by typical Indian spices. The base of the curry consists of tomatoes, onions, and just a couple tablespoons of tamarind pulp to get that true South Indian taste.
The egg variation of the malabar curry
I would highly recommend anybody interested in South Indian cooking to try out this dish! Besides coconut milk, tomatoes, onions, tamarind, and your typical Indian spices, nothing out of the ordinary is required. The dish can be eaten either with rice or an Indian bread: my bread of choice is a roti or malabari paratha. Thank you again to Jamie Oliver for the recipe!
Of course, no full dinner is complete without dessert. I worked in Southeast Asia last summer, and for whatever reason, I was craving these Hong Kong-style egg tarts that I’d frequently get at a bakery near where I lived.
The actual first egg tart I’d ever eaten! Taken in June 2019 at the Tai Cheong Bakery in Singapore’s Holland Village location.
I got right to work and perused Hong Kong-style egg tart recipes on Google, and I quickly found a very simple recipe from Tasty. I should note that the last time I baked anything was over a decade ago, so I was very nervous about securing the right ingredients let alone actually baking it. Luckily, the ingredients were very simple: just some butter, cake flour, sugar, evaporated milk, eggs, and some vanilla.
The hardest part of the entire process was kneading the dough and pressing it into the cupcake tray I was using to create the tarts. It has since come to my attention that there are specific tart trays that one can use for this particular dessert, but that’s okay. To my luck, the tarts came out well! And because they came out well, I had to at the very least attempt to take some artsy pictures.
Overall, the unusual combination of a traditional South Indian curry with a Southeast Asian dessert worked out quite well. Especially for a family of four, these two recipes served us well. Thank you again to Tasty for the egg tart recipe!
The silver lining of the quarantine is that there is ample opportunity to try out new recipes in the kitchen. While I have cooked quite a bit before, this is the first time I’ve put any of my creations online - I decided to start a blog of sorts on the recommendation of a friend to whom I kept spamming cooking pictures. Let me know if you have any suggestions for subsequent recipes to try out!
