Last weekend when I slow roasted lamb barbacoa wrapped in banana leaves, I did a video of the process and posted it to Instagram Story, where it received quite a number of views and surprisingly, a lot more direct private messages than I’d ever received for any video I’ve uploaded. People commented on how impressive and professional the cooking looked. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it had less to do with how “professional” the process looked, and more to do with the fact that cooking with big banana leaves just appears to be laborious and fancy, especially to people who don’t cook much. A pound of banana leaves at the Vietnamese market costs about $1.30, and all I had to do to prep them was to dip them in hot water to wash off any potential dirt or grime. All I did was wrap the big lamb leg in it. That was really it.

Because I had so many leftover banana leaves, I wanted to find another use for them soon so that the novelty wouldn’t wear off, so I not only used my remaining ancho and guajillo chili marinade to flavor chicken, but I also wrapped these up into banana leaves and steamed them. I even tied and knotted them with slivers of banana leaf. These videos today also received a lot of comments; it really was very little work to get this done, but it’s obvious that banana leaves add a “wow” factor to my audience who enjoys my cooking. I also noticed that the flavor of the banana leaf came through more in the chicken tonight than it did in the lamb last week, so I think I will reserve my remaining banana leaves for steaming smaller pieces of meat or other fillings.

When the circumstances of our country are out of my control… which is pretty much every day that I am not able to vote, I just have to throw my energy at the things that I love, like food and cooking. I spent the last couple of days shopping and prepping for our lamb barbacoa meal tonight. I made the ancho and guajillo-chile-based marinade on Friday, purchased the tomatillos for the salsa verde yesterday, and then wrapped up the Australian lamb leg in banana leaves today and roasted it for just over two hours. I wasn’t sure how long to roast it for given the original recipe had an eight-pound leg and said to roast it for eight hours, and I had a five-pound leg. So I started researching roasting a lamb leg and decided that just over two hours would be enough… but it really wasn’t. It was certainly done. It tasted good and certainly tasted like lamb and barbacoa, but the pull-apart tenderness was not there likely because I didn’t roast it for long enough. Then, I went back to the harissa lamb leg recipe I used last time I made lamb at home that was very tender, and that was a four-pound leg that I left in the oven for five hours. The roasting also wasn’t long enough for the banana leaf flavor to really penetrate the meat. I cut up the meat feeling disappointed.

This is one of the reasons I hear when people say that even if they are meat eaters, they don’t like or just completely avoid preparing meat at home. It can be hit or miss with the timing, doneness, and tenderness. Then, there’s also the factor of messiness because meat fat tends to get everywhere, even when you don’t expect it.

Although I am open about my love for Costco, one thing I am not a huge fan of is their whole organic chickens. Although they are sizable, well-priced, and organic, the one failing they have is that they are not air-chilled. What does that mean? It means that instead of being hung and air-dried, they are instead packed in water and then sealed. What this ultimately results in is a massive amount of excess water (and thus wetness) when you defrost the chicken and get it ready for roasting. This causes problems if you are concerned with having extremely crispy skin. The only way to get crispy chicken skin is to separate the skin from the chicken flesh, and then make sure it’s as dry as possible by sopping out any excess wetness on the external surface (and in the cavity). Getting an air-chilled chicken is the faster and easier route to the holy land of crispy chicken skin. Having a regular chicken will result in spots that will never fully dry out, even if you leave the chicken uncovered in your fridge overnight (which I always do before roasting a whole chicken). Neither of the whole Costco chickens that were packed in water ever achieved the ultimate Crispy Chicken Skin status that I wanted. But tonight’s air-chilled Whole Foods whole chicken did.

And it was delectable and glorious. Though Chris complained when I served the breast first (when you roast chicken, the breast will always be the most succulent on the day of; and every day after that, it just gets worser and drier. That’s just white meat for you). “Why do we have to eat breast? Why can’t we just have all dark meat? F— breast.”

That’s not really how a whole chicken works…

With a short trip coming up that will have us leaving on Wednesday, I’ve been taking a quick inventory of all the things we need to finish in our fridge. One of those perishable items included a cup of heavy cream. One cup of heavy cream is perfect for one batch of scones, for which I already had all the ingredients for. I can’t even remember the last time I made scones, but I really love them — not the hard, heavy American-style ones, but the light, airy British ones that are a bit crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside. America’s Test Kitchen recipes are always keepers for me, so I went back to my tried and true recipe for their cream scones and added mixed dried berries to it. I kneaded the dough a bit, laid it out, and poked out the scones with my fluted biscuit cutter. They came out just as pretty and tasty as I remember from the last time I made them… which was years ago — much too long ago. They’re so easy and fast to make that it’s a shame I don’t make them at least once or twice a year. I’m definitely changing this now.

The latest version of the 6-quart Instant Pot is definitely finicky to say the least. It needs enough water in it so that the bottom doesn’t burn and give you the very common and much dreaded “burn” message, but “enough” water is very subjective depending on what you are cooking. I already ruined vegetable biryani on Saturday, but after two more tries in making black-eyed pea curry and an Indian-style eggplant called baingan bharta, I’ve realized that there are certainly glories in having this “instant” pot. Beans and eggplant cook incredibly quickly. All my cooking for yesterday’s dinner was done by 3:45pm, and I cannot remember the last time I made a full meal on a Sunday when I was ready that much in advance of dinner time. I barely even knew what to do with myself. Do I clean more? Can I read? Write another entry on this blog? Who knew that laborious and time-intensive cooking could be shortened so much?!

I’m still wary of cooking rice in it, though, unless I try the “pot in pot” method, which of course would require yet another accessory, which I’m not sure I want to invest in quite yet. I will likely be keeping the rice cooker we have for now until I figure out how not to burn rice in the Instant pot main pot.

Even though I enjoy cooking a lot and have since I was a teen, I realize that I tend to overlook a lot of terms and definitions that I shouldn’t. For example, I didn’t realize until three years ago that there was a difference between a slow cooker and a pressure cooker; I thought those terms were just interchangeable. So when I finally invested in a slow cooker early in 2015, I was disappointed when I realized that a pressure cooker was what I really wanted, and I made a mistake purchase; quicker cooking, quicker results, quicker broths, faster extraction of flavor from bones. But I made do with my mistake purchase… I got a lot of use out of it cooking beans, making stock, stews, mashed potatoes, even butter chicken and Hyderabadi biryani. It was a good 3.5 years that we were active together.

But then lo and behold, shortly after I bought my slow cooker in 2015, I was late to join the band wagon and learn about the Instant Pot, this crazy cooker that could do seven different things: pressure cook, slow cook, steam, saute/sear, make yogurt, make rice, and warm food. And then I realized that I made a huge, huge mistake: I just bought an appliance that would have zero resale value given the millions and millions of people who either want or have an Instant Pot.

So Amazon Prime day came this week, and the Instant Pot is the cheapest I’ve ever seen it at $58.99. So we obviously got it, plus a couple accessories. I’m planning to test it out by making egg and vegetable biryani this weekend. But now my dilemma is: who is going to buy my slow cooker? Is it even able to be sold?

Since we’ve come back from India, deciding what to eat has been pretty difficult. At work, I’m lucky to be able to get Seamless ordered from any place within the delivery radius of our office, but even that has been a (first world) struggle in deciding what I want. I think part of the reason I can’t decide is because I keep thinking about all the flavors and textures I had during our India trip, and I honestly would prefer to just continue eating different variations of that while here. But alas, that isn’t quite possible, especially in the Flatiron area where my office is.

So on Friday night, I made a masoor dal, a lentil stew, to satiate my dal cravings. Then, on Saturday, I made a version of the minced string bean dish that Chris’s grandmother’s servant made for us. It’s called green bean thoran and is a very common vegetable side dish in the state of Kerala, where Chris’s family on both sides is originally from. It was purposely different than the one the servant made, but still tasty and what I wanted. And then today, I made a version of Indian-Chinese vegetable fried rice. Unfortunately, it tasted nothing like the Indian fried rice we had at the Intercontinental in Mumbai, where we were able to enjoy a few gorgeous breakfasts. I remember asking the server and then the chef what spices were used in their fried rice that was part of their breakfast buffet, and they insisted no spices were used, just salt, pepper, chilies, and broth powder. We have no idea what spices were in the broth powder. Ugh. I even tried doing multiple variations of Google searches for “Indian Chinese fried rice recipe” that yielded zero even partially promising results. Lastly, I defrosted the organic chicken I had gotten from Costco a few months ago, spatchcocked it (removed the backbone, and for the very first time, which I was terrified of doing… It was actually harder than the videos made it look. You really need to apply some elbow grease even when you do have a pair of kitchen shears, which I specifically bought for this purpose), and rubbed home-blended garam masala spices over it, then roasted it whole for dinner. After seeing how quickly a whole chicken roasts (35 minutes!) in the oven with its backbone removed, I may never roast a whole chicken with its back bone in ever again. This was truly dinner-changing.

Now, I’m wondering what will be next: Kerala fish fry? Double-rise dosa? Cabbage poriyal? The list of things I want to make has only grown exponentially since this trip has concluded.

I had imagined that for my parents-in-law arriving today that I would prepare a Persian themed meal for them, and so I picked up just over two pounds of New Zealand lamb loin chops while they were on sale at Whole Foods this week. Well, apparently I didn’t think this through and thought two pounds of meat would be more than enough for the four of us… but I didn’t factor in that the weight was mostly in the bones. So I had to think of another protein that would fit my Persian theme. Since my pantry is filled with so many different types of legumes, I decided upon a Persian lentil stew that seemed fairly straightforward and easy to make.

The funny thing about this as I studied the recipe is that Persian lentils are prepared very much the same way that Indian lentils can be prepared; the only major difference seemed to be in the fact that in the Indian lentils I am used to making, there’s always ginger and hing, whereas in this Persian recipe, there’s no ginger or hing, and cinnamon is added at the end. It actually gives a slight sweet and pleasantly spicy note to the lentils that I’d never thought would work before, but I really enjoyed. I could completely see how this could be Persian comfort food in its simplest form.

I showed the lentils to Chris, and he said, “That’s Indian.” I responded, “No, it’s Persian.” To which he responded again, “Same shit.” I guess it kind of is. Persians and Indians and Pakistanis were once one people, and now they’re different… but the spices they use are pretty much the same.