Читать книгу Miss Masala - Mallika Basu - Страница 23

Cooking for eight in order to feed two is a sub-continental cultural phenomenon. Where I come from, it is customary to feel overwhelmed by hospitality and the vast quantities of food served. Who am I to disregard years of ritual overfeeding?

In fact, this time-honoured tradition works rather well for me. If I’m going to forgo speed-dialling my local Japanese takeaway, I want to savour the results more than just once.

This means I have a special relationship with Tupperware. I buy a lot of it but deplete most of my supply by drunkenly distributing doggy bags to guests after dinner parties. Then I start stockpiling them again. My fridge contains more Tupperware than food. There are boxes filled with half-used vegetables, leftover chopped tomatoes and fresh puréed ginger and garlic paste.

We eat our fill of what was cooked the day before. The remainder gets stashed away in the freezer for another day’s feast. I’ve worked out that you can freeze just about anything: dal, chicken curry, lamb curry and so on. But not cooked potatoes or rice. I learnt the hard way that they get horribly soggy when you defrost them at room temperature or in a microwave.

How long the stuff lasts in a freezer clearly depends on the appliance. In the knock-off, creaking freezer supplied by a penny-pinching landlord, I could wait about a month before sensibly emptying the contents of rock-solid Tupperware. In my glossy, second-hand Smeg, I give each frozen box about two months.

And each time, the food tastes even better defrosted and reheated. Firstly, because it’s the flavoursome leftovers (as explained on page). Secondly, because I didn’t have to cook it from scratch on a day when I simply didn’t have the energy to do so.