For as long as I can remember, I’ve cooked food that eliminates the need to, well, cook. When I was single, my standard serving, for instance, was 1.5kg of keema for myself—spread out over the week and eaten for every meal until it was finished.
When I lived in the US for two years, I ate this keema (or roast chicken or mutton curry) with store-bought tortillas. In India, I made rice, or there was always someone who made chapatis for me. This efficient cooking and eating style left me with both homemade food and a lot of time. Plus, meat always tastes better when it sits around for a couple of days.
This technique gradually faded over the years with the arrival of a family. My spouse grew up in a hotel with fresh food and was quite aghast at my approach to cooking and storage. Over the years, she and I adapted. She happily eats two-day-old chole, and I cook smaller quantities, which are often finished the next or same day.
As my child grew, I realised there was no going back to the old life. My old approach to cooking was built around repetition. Parenthood, I know now, is built around novelty. Without saying so explicitly, she expects me to make something new almost every day, eating leftovers only with reluctance. Perhaps I have only myself to blame.
I’ve cooked for years now, everything from 30-person dinners to dinners for two, and I did it all in a fairly matter-of-fact fashion. Even today, if I’m not sure about someone else’s cooking, I’d rather do it myself because I like to like what I eat.
All this changed after the daughter achieved sentience and formed an opinion, which she proceeded to express rather freely about my cooking. Slowly, I transformed from a cook with an I-don’t-really-care-what-you-think attitude to a child-pleasing man who anxiously glances across at her to gauge what she really thinks—particularly if her only response is, “good”.
In other words, I am troublingly over-eager to please this ill-formed, precocious bundle of adolescence. Such is parenthood, I suppose.
Since she’s always impatiently waiting on the next new thing, I scramble and struggle to innovate and reinvent. In trying to curry favour, as it were, I have been forced to abandon my old ways.
As you might imagine, it is not always easy to provide new twists to the same basic food: rice, meat and—occasionally—vegetables or salad. My refuge now is easy ingredients for quick dinners and school lunches. The recipe below is one such example.
What I am learning rapidly is how to repurpose the same dish in a new avatar for the next meal. With this ginger-spring onion steamed chicken, for instance, I made sure to reserve the liquid gold—the broth that emerged from steaming the chicken. While the first serving was a hit, I could not, of course, be sure that the consumer-in-chief would rhapsodise about it as eagerly as she did the first time.
So, I mixed the broth with a touch of soy sauce, added garlic and smoked chipotle powder to some oil, and mixed in the leftover chicken and rice. It was enough for a whole new entrée to emerge at 5am in five, bleary-eyed minutes as school lunch.
I may never return to the glorious days of eating 1.5kg of keema over six consecutive meals. But I have discovered a compromise that requires only some thought and deft fiddling with ingredients. The trick is not to cook something new every day. It is to make yesterday’s dinner look like something entirely different by lunchtime.
GINGER-SPRING ONION STEAMED CHICKEN
Serves 2
Ingredients
2 whole chicken legs, skin on
4 spring onions, roughly chopped
6 large slices fresh ginger
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine (optional)
1 tbsp toasted white sesame seeds
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 spring onion stalk, cut lengthwise into thin strips for garnish
Salt, to taste
Method
Arrange the chicken legs in a steamer around an inverted cup or small bowl. Scatter the chopped spring onions and ginger slices over the chicken. Cover and steam for 20 minutes. Steaming the chicken around an inverted cup creates space for the steam to circulate evenly and helps collect a rich, concentrated broth that becomes the base of the sauce.
Turn off the heat and let the chicken rest in the steamer for 3 minutes.
Carefully remove the chicken and collect the broth that has accumulated during steaming. Set the broth aside.
Once the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove the skin and shred or tear the meat into bite-sized pieces. Arrange on a serving plate.
In a bowl, make the sauce by combining the reserved broth, oyster sauce, soy sauce and rice wine, if using. Heat the sesame oil until hot, then pour it into the sauce mixture and stir well. Pour the warm sauce over the shredded chicken. Taste and add salt if needed. Garnish with the toasted sesame seeds and the curled spring onion strips.
Serve immediately over hot steamed rice.
Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.