Global Village Idiot: Cooking ginger chicken in the search of a good broth

Cooking - like life - is super fun when you make up a recipe with ingredients your children suggest. It’s also a great learning ground for honing skills related to social collaboration, design and communication

So, I cook once in a while. And since I get bored with following recipes, I don’t: I make up stuff depending on what’s available in the kitchen and inside the refrigerator. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not that great. But after 30 years of trying, it’s mostly edible.

I believe that constructing a recipe and cooking with children is a much better way of instilling a love for the culinary art and making them independent. (Getty Images)

More than the taste, cooking is great fun for the kids - they love talking food, washing vegetables, stirring, generally cooking... and they are game for anything. Naturally, we have a good repertoire of our own recipes now, but it’s the approach that is very handy in a household of kids.

Here’s a food recipe that is easy to make, doesn’t require too much and: it came out of a conversation with my youngest child, T-Rex (he’s The Dinosaur Expert in a family of dinosaur experts, ergo the nickname). The way it happened was thus.

“Why do we always have to have chicken in a curry?” T-Rex asked, getting ready for an argument.

“Who says so? We don’t.” I replied, surprising him with my reasonableness.

“Can we make chicken with tomatoes?”

“Yes, is that what you want today?”

“Yes. Only chicken and tomatoes. Nothing else.”

“We can do that.”

I had boneless chicken with me, so he helped me wash it. Then I placed it on the chopping board and took up my knife.

“I want small pieces. Round small pieces. And not too fat,” T-Rex instructed.

I nodded and cut the first chunk out.

“I changed my mind. Can you make it oval? I don’t want round pieces.”

“Yes, we can.” And with a bit of slanting, we had nice oval bite-sized pieces. He had been learning about perimeters and areas of different shapes and I was happy he didn’t say star-shaped pieces, or his current favourite: Octagon.

“How do you want the tomatoes?”

“Hmm, cut it like you did that day-triangle shaped.”

“Okay. Those are called quarters, but yes, they do look triangle shaped.”

“So, a quarter is a triangle with a curve?”

“Umm, it’s a fourth part of a circle. So, if you take a circle and cut it into four equal parts, each part is called a quarter.”

He thought about it and then stated, “So, it’s like every 15 minutes on a clock is a quarter of the clock. Okay, cut the tomatoes into quarters then.”

There were three tomatoes, I was about to start on the second one when he spoke again.

“Let me cut one tomato. I know how to cut.”

“Here you can cut two.”

Meanwhile, I took some ghee in a shallow pan, slid the chicken in and then the tomatoes as he finished cutting. The aroma was awesome.

“I love that smell! And it looks so red!” T-Rex exclaimed.

“How about some salt?”

“Yes, put some salt. And put haldi. I like haldi.”

So, I put salt and haldi.

“Ginger. And black olives. Can we have black olives please? I like black olives,” he declared.

So, I reduced the flame, quickly washed, peeled and cut the ginger into thick strips and plonked them into the pan and stir-fried on a high flame.

“What about the olives?”

“They don’t need to cook, so we can add those in the end.”

And which is what we did. Sliced olives tossed in at the end and then two minutes of stirring and dished out.

If you have 400-500 grams of boneless chicken handy, this dish takes 15 minutes to prepare. The small, thin oval cut makes it cook faster. The tomatoes (2), ginger (a large piece say about 20 gms), haldi (1 teaspoon) and salt (1 teaspoon) gives it the foundation and it’s a moist dish which goes well with buttered rice or noodle soup. How many olives? Depends on you. If you don’t have olives, do without, or use some black grapes if you have some.

The dish turned out to T-Rex’s liking. Mostly.

“So, tomato makes a dish tangy,” he observed as we were eating. The rest of the family liked the dish too. “I think we need some spice. Next time we should add green chilly. And potatoes, I like potatoes. They will go well with this dish. Too much tang is boring after a few bites!” T-Rex concluded.

Everybody else contributed their suggestions as we ate. T-Rex thought about all the suggestions and vetoed all of them. “No, it’ll be this dish plus potatoes and chilly. You can make your own recipe with vegetables and whatever you want. This is how I like it.”

Cooking - like life - is super fun when you make up a recipe with ingredients your children suggest. It’s also a great learning ground for honing skills related to social collaboration, design and communication. And while I stand by the adage that too many cooks can end up spoiling the broth, I also believe that constructing a recipe and cooking with children is a much better way of instilling a love for the culinary art and making them independent.

Sometimes you need to spoil the broth a few times on the path to learning what constitutes a good broth and how to make one.

Sanjay Mukherjee, author, learning-tech designer and management consultant, is founder of Mountain Walker and chief strategy advisor, Peak Pacific. He can be reached at thebengali@icloud.com