As I type this, I’m waiting for my breakfast to be ready. The recipe I’m following, Tangy Tamarind Chickpeas, from the new The Indian Slow Cooker by former CLTV reporter Anupy Singla, said it was only supposed to take 12 hours. But it’s been cooking for about four days, and the chickpeas, which still have the texture and taste of hard, hot chalk balls, show no sign of absorbing the continually replenished liquid they’ve been roiling in off and on all week. That’s probably just as well, because the sweet, tangy, spicy sauce it started with now tastes like burnt coffee.
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“In my opinion you can prepare almost anything in a rice cooker,” he writes. “Including a recipe I am working on now, So-Called Pot Roast.”
The instructions for my simple, two-temperature rice cooker explicitly forbade using it for anything but steaming grains and vegetables. But Ebert’s enthusiasm is empowering, and his reverence for the powers of the pot is almost mystical: “How does the Pot know how long to cook the rice? It is an ancient mystery of the Orient. Don’t ask questions you don’t need the answers to.”
That’s all I needed to know to get started on her South Indian Lentils With Curry Leaves. Halving her recipe, I loaded my rice cooker with a cup and a half of masoor dal (red split lentils), plus onions, tomato, chiles, cumin, coriander, turmeric, salt, and four and a half cups of water. It was supposed to take six hours, but 40 minutes in, the cooker clicked from “cook” to “keep warm.” I gave the lentils a stir, turned the machine back on, and in another 30 minutes they were done. I worried that the relatively truncated cooking time hadn’t given the spices time to harmonize and develop flavor, so I left the cooker on warm for the duration, adding the coconut milk and curry leaves during the last half hour as directed.
Ebert wrote his book for people who “would like to be able to prepare meals simply and quickly in a very limited amount of space—not even necessarily in a kitchen.” It’s clear that “quickly” isn’t always possible, nor can you cook everything you want in the pot. But if the collected slow cookers of the world were to suddenly self-destruct, at least some So-Called Pot Roast would still be possible.
Roger Ebert (Andrews McMeel)
The Indian Slow Cooker: 50 Healthy, Easy, Authentic Recipes Anupy Singla (Agate Surrey)
