Menu v2

Menu R&D w/ the good and the bad and learnings for later

Okay, we are back. 24 days later but… we are sooo back.

This is going to be a running series where I R&D my menu, often in the form of a trial run with a small collective of wonderful friends that I host.

I’m hoping the structure follows something like this:

1. What the vibe of the menu was

2. What the menu was

   1. Breakdown of the good and the bad

3. Learnings for later

Make sense? Doesn’t to me! But we’re going to run with it in hopes of just getting content out.

A co-worker of mine once said that it’s better that something is written down somewhere rather than nowhere… which to me was an immediate “well yeah, no sh!t” but honestly holds very true given that I often spend SO much time figuring out the perfect format and structure for something that I end up not writing anything at all.

I know the post says v2 when this is technically the first menu r&d I’ve posted, but there was a super secret v1 that already happened that was basically the same stuff I cooked here but worse, so figured I’d start fresh :)

The Vibes

Alright, so I’ve established that at its core my menu is based in homestyle South Indian food. Nothing should super fancy or intricate but rather have mindful elevations that make you feel like the food is homecooked, but something more.

This menu was for a late Sunday lunch… and I tried to provide a balance of having small appetizer-y things as well as some carbs, meat, grain, etc. all at the same time. I’m big on “give me everything and let me decide how to eat it”, which to me is a great reflection of the meals I’ve had growing up in an Indian household.

Because this was a late lunch, I wanted to make sure I had a lot of quantity of food but not a whole bunch of variety. Indian medium-sized tapas if you will.

^This is where my lack of restaurant/food-world knowledge shows because for the life of me I can’t describe food in more complex ways other than “mm yummy in my tummy” Lol

I apologize if I oversimplify or overspecify, I’m working on it gang.

The Menu

Here’s what I ended up cookin’

For the friends salad

Roasted paneer + chickpeas, crunchy fried onions w/ fresh butter lettuce, tomatoes, and microgreens, all dressed in a sweet-tangy tamarind-lime vinaigrette and garnished with pomegranate arils (a.k.a seeds for you dumb-dumb idiots)

Upon review, this salad is pretty much a play on a chopped salad… so moving forward I will be renaming this to the “chaat chopped”.

The good

It was literally the p e r f e c t combination of flavors and textures, just enough but didn’t leave you wanting more. I’m huge on grains in a salad but I think that roasted chickpeas and paneer give you what a grain would do in a salad which makes this a lot more sustainable/efficient over time. Tangy + sweet + spicy salads for the win.

The bad

In a fit of nervous energy to get the meal done, I did a rough chop on the lettuce and tomatoes which made the salad have a bunch of itty bitty things but a couple of large things… so you had to eat the salad with a fork + knife sometimes, and a spoon the others?

I didn’t think about the proportions properly and that backfired a bit which sucks when it’s a giant salad and supposed to feed multiple people. Slap on the wrist for me.

Potatoes fondant served w/ a tomato cashew curry

Potatoes cut into medallions, seared in butter till golden, then slow cooked in vegetable broth and tempered with a myriad of spices.

This was served with a rich, creamy ;) curry w/ tomatoes and cashews that are simmered in spices and blended together.

The good

Won’t lie gang there’s not a lot of good here, but we’re on a positivity tip so just to say something good… the curry didn’t outright suck. Next.

The bad

So I think the easiest way for me to describe the outcome here is like this: It was like I was trying to paint something and had the core things on the canvas and wanted to add glitter… but the glitter wouldn’t stick so I kept throwing glitter that wouldn’t stick and all of a sudden there’s glitter all over the floor and the painting sucked anyway and now I’m crying, you know what I mean?

[I was deeply manic]

I had the base down, seasonings mapped out, etc. but for some damn reason the flavor never really stuck. I was stuck in a loop of seasoning → simmering → drying out the curry → adding water → seasoning → simmering → jumping out of the window

I have to try to workshop this curry in isolation but I’m getting close to just 86ing it (Jeremy Allen White, did I use that correctly?)

I think the problem with this dish is that there’s too many moving parts. You have a plate of potatoes and then a curry next to it and if you put it on top it’s like weirdly placed and if you don’t it’s like “oh I didn’t order that”…. there’s some way to combine the idea I have where I want to make an elevated potato + tomato curry but I think I’m elevating it too much to the point where I’ve lost the plot.

Pepper rasam

A spicy, tangy South Indian soup-like side dish made with freshly ground black pepper, tomatoes, tamarind, garlic, and curry leaves, tempered with mustard seeds and cumin in ghee.

The good

Tamarind is an extremely important ingredient in rasam that needs to get steeped in hot water and squeezed into the soup. It can very easily be overdiluted and not sour enough, or make the rasam taste like a warhead.

I absolutely nailed the ratio this time so thank the gods.

The bad

Mom, I’m sorry… I used store bought rasam powder. Shame.

It was very bad and I will not be doing it again.

Ghee whole roasted chicken fry

Whole chicken marinated in toasted poppy seeds, coconut, red chili powder, etc. slow-roasted with ghee.

The good

Oooooweeeeee this was the big bang of the menu and the item I was most nervous about because it was the first time I cooked a whole chicken. I got one that was cleaned and spatchcocked at a butcher (shout out Big Apple Grocers in Lincoln Park) and it was actually so so so easy to work with.

Spicy, juicy, roasted, toasted, crunchy skin, savory, glorious, everything above x100.

The bad

The only comment I have here is serving style… I wanted this to be paired with the rasam and when I took the bird out of the oven and cut it into larger chunks, I think it became hard to be able to eat both at the same time. I gotta get some butcher skills going and be able to know how to properly cut a whole chicken to make it more readily eatable without having folks need to pick too many bones and stuff out.

Chai affogato

Sounds like what it is! Some chai decoction¹ poured over vanilla ice cream.

The good

Perfection. No notes!

The bad

Not enough of it tbh.

Learnings

1. Think like a consumer

   1. When creating this menu, I spent more time thinking about what would be cool to see on it and make instead of what would be cool to physically eat. There’s a lot on this menu and while I want to keep the “bring me everything and let me decide” mindset when it comes to the overall vibe, there can be a bit more structure behind what I make. I need to ask questions like What would I want to eat and when? Do I need spoons, forks, knives, everything? Do I need bowls, salad plates, bigger plates, etc? Do I have to endlessly pass around of dishes and plates? I think there’s some user-discovery I need to do there that I’ll spend more time on.

2. Prep work is everything

   1. I was a lazy bum and thought I could wake up in the morning, have a coffee, and prep for the meal. None of that happened and I very predictably ran out of time lol. Prep as much as soon and as much as you can because time is everything when you’re cooking a meal for people and I’ve learned that the hard way too many times.

3. Thinking in phases

   1. A really great practice I used while cooking was thinking of my menu in terms of "phases”. There’s an image below of how I mapped it out but it kind of led to a cooking strategy like this:

      1. I knew my friends were going to be here to eat at 1:30 P.M. so I knew that everything HAD to be done by then → which lets me know that the chicken would need to go in the oven at the latest by 1:00 P.M. since it takes 30 min to cook → the chicken needed to be marinated for at least 20 min which means that needed to be done by 12:40 P.M. → marinade requires me to toast, then cool spices so that was going to take 15 min so that sets me at 12:25 P.M. → and so on and so on.

   2. Thinking in phases and working backwards helped me figure out when I needed to start and stop things which made my order of operations pretty straightforward… luckily not much went awry here because if it did I would’ve stuck my head in the oven and slammed the door. So we’ll deal with improvisation later.

Some pics from the meal! Thank you Madison, Bella, and Will... you beautiful people.

Amazing, we made it.

In conclusion, things went better than expected and I took a lot of notes to keep iterating and changing things with not only my menu but my process as well.

Again, this blog is severely a work in progress and idk how many of you are going to make it all the way to this point, but if you did thank you (if you didn’t you’re stinky ew)… it would mean a whole lot to me to hear what you think about this menu, the dishes, some of the thoughts and ideas I had above, or about anything in general.

Hoping to get some more shorter series out soon! Thanks again for the support.

ఇట్లు,

Saketh

1. Decoction is a term for a liquid concentrate often created by boiling or heating something herbal. Till this point I thought it was a fake word my mom would use to refer to tea and coffee sometimes bc she was just being silly.