Ah... wow... that was... interesting. I just fed over a dozen people.
Here's how the night went:
I made plans to start slicing and such at 4:00, giving me enough time to set everything up at 5 to cook to be ready by 6. At 3 I realized I'd forgotten to take the beef and chicken out of the freezer to thaw, and rushrushed to do so, resetting the "start slicing" time to 4:30. Then at 4:30 I realized the tofu, though not in the freezer part, was next to the freezer part and thus entirely frozen. So I had to run and stick that in the sink, too, while I sliced the chicken.
Sliced the chicken, decided to rearrange my plans to instead cook things one at a time, and poured the coconut cream into the wok to bring to boiling. I then opened the yellow curry mix packet and pulled out the plastic containing the yellow curry mix.
It was green.The coconut cream had by then come swiftly to a boil, and I had less than five minutes to come up with a curry recipe without half the ingredients I use for most curry recipes. Shit. So, cursing my mouth off in English and Japanese, I gathered together some red curry paste and light brown sugar and began to improvise.
( The Last-Second Recipe ) Then, after the chicken was done, I made the beef curry (thankfully the masman curry mix was fine), with potatoes and peanuts, which meant it took longer to cook, and I think I forgot the fish sauce... I also made a tofu curry in a pot with the same improvised recipe as the chicken, though perhaps with a bit more curry paste and with potatoes added. It was pretty popular, especially for being mild rather than spicy, and I ended up with a small serving size left for leftovers out of the two pounds of beef and three potatoes I'd put in it.
The making of the tofu curry was rather interesting. I poured in the coconut cream, turned up the heat, almost overboiled the pot, added the tofu, and did manage to overboil the pot. A lot. It took a while to tame it before it finally subsided. It turned out successful enough, though most people don't like tofu and so there were plenty of leftovers to hand to my friend who loves the stuff.
Surprisingly enough, the chicken was the most popular dish, and the dinner wasn't entirely finished before I ran out, and everyone kept requesting it. My friend demanded I double the amount of chicken next time.
Then, after all the food was made and everyone was eating, I cleaned out the wok for the third time and added oil. Popopopopopop. Ssss. POP. POP. POP. "AHHH!!! RUN!!!!". After some confusion, I managed to successfully turn down/off the heat. Then began the battle with the Niangao (New Year's rice cake). It hissed, spit, flung pops of oil at me every time I added a chunk of Niangao to the wok. Turning it over was... interesting. This was, in fact, the first time the food I was cooking both scared and endangered me. I leaped back several times, stabbing at it in the air with my wok stirrer, attempting to fight off the foul beast. And, alas, at the end of it, it wasn't well-fried and wasn't very popular. Our RA, however, loved it and kept asking for more.
He then declared me an official floor chef, and proclaimed me better than Paul, our other floor chef, who cooks more often than I do. I still have plenty Niangao left, though, which I intend to reheat and force upon my Chinese class. And I'm rather certain I provided an interesting show for anyone watching the kitchen.
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