Listen to the Rain

In Japan, there's a dish called オムライス ("omuraisu"), which if you're familiar with how the Japanese love to make portmanteaus, you know means omelet rice. It's usually made with fried rice, fried mostly in ketchup but sometimes in tonkatsu sauce or other heavier sauces, placed on the bottom and then a thin, slightly sweet omelet on top. It's the kind of thing that your mother makes for you in the winter when you can barely muster up the urge to get out of the kotatsu because it's freezing out, or when you're studying for your university exams and forgot to eat for most of the day. It's not very good for you, but it's really filling and it's great comfort food.

"But dorchadas," I hear you ask, "This is Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries! Why are you talking about Japan?" Dear reader, if you've ever had an in-depth conversation with me, I'm sure you know that every conversation with me eventually becomes, "I lived in Japan, and you did not." Unless you did live in Japan, in which case it is, "We both lived in Japan! Let us reminisce about experiences that everyone else has no context for!" But nonetheless, I have a legitimate reason for my introduction here--I would have much rather eaten オムライス than this curry.



The curry wasn't bad so much as just...nothing. There was a lot of fennel and that's about it. The egg tasted like totally normal egg, but it was thin strips spread out among the rest of the ingredients that didn't do enough to lend their taste to the curry. The sauce tasted bland, the onions were bland, the tomatoes were bland, it was all just this kind of tasteless slurry that ran together and I actually had to force myself to finish. There's so much tasty food out there, why am I eating something with no taste at all?

50 Great Curries of India suggests bread with this curry, so we went to Whole Foods and grabbed a nice loaf of ancestral grain bread and here's your link to Stuff White People Like, I've saved you the trouble. The bread was pretty good, and it actually combined really nicely when I used it to soak up some of the sauce. But I think that's a virtue entirely of the bread, not the sauce itself.



Words from the Chef

There isn't a lot to write about here because in all honesty, there wasn't a lot to this curry. The fennel taste was strong, but I like fennel a lot. That was about the only flavor. I thought maybe I was just spoiled by having fish and yogurt curry twice this week but nope, it's clearly just not that great a curry. I wouldn't make it again, not because it's awful, there's just nothing to recommend it.

What my talented and lovely wife didn't write there is her comments while we were eating, where she blamed the curry's blandness on its intended method of consumption. 50 Great Curries of India says it's an "ideal dish for brunch or high tea," which certainly implies blandness to me as well. I know I'd love to have a super-spicy curry to go along with my tea and tiny sandwiches, but I am probably a minority on that score.

The book also says that "the gravy is like a thick spicy coating around the omelette strips," which is just a blatant lie. Or it's possible that something was missed along the way somewhere. I know that the curries schoolpsychnerd makes tend to have gravies that are a bit more watery than they often appear in the book, and usually that's fine with me because I like them better than way. But maybe in this case it was a problem? I doubt I'll ever find out, because there's an embarrassment of curry riches in this book and I can't think of anything that would convince me to ask for this curry again.



And that's the long and short of it. Even now, less than an hour after I ate it, I can't even remember what it tasted like. I can remember the bits of egg and the taste of the bread, but that's it. That's pretty damning for a curry.

Would I Eat It Again?: No.
Do I Prefer It to the Usual Thai Curry?: No.
What Would I Change?: I'd eat egg kurma from last week, which does a much better job with mixing eggs and curry.