My year of "slow"

Slowing down in the kitchen can go beyond slow cooking

It’s that time of the year when strangers on the internet make me jealous with their ‘words of the year’, a single word that reminds them of everything they want to do or be in 2024. Not because #mombrain means I can’t remember anything to put on my “annual review”.

But rather because choosing a single word to summarise an entire year feels as hard as choosing my last meal.

To write this newsletter, I persisted. Three minutes of reflection in the bathroom while my boys asked me 84 questions from outside, I had my word.

As someone who sells curry pastes to make dinners easy, I’ve made it my job to stir together something cheap and nutritious, that my children will also eat, and doesn’t take longer than 20 minutes to put together. My Instagram search tells me I’m borderline addicted to #quickcooking, #15minutemeals and #instantdinners.

So for the first week of embracing ‘Slow’, I couldn’t think of anything except for the slow cooker languishing on my garage shelf.

We’ve all enjoyed the creamy, smoky Dahl Makhani I made after months. My slow-cooked Hoisin Pork Shoulder performed like an index fund investment helping me make rice bowls, burgers, and fried rice. At the pot-luck last weekend, my lets-call-it-Tuscan bean stew that we scooped up with crisp lettuce shells went down a treat too. But with work starting properly this week, I’ve found myself packing away the slow cooker again.

An indulgent Pork Mac and Cheese was just one of the dishes I made using my Hoisin Pork

I did some more reflection (again in the bathroom) and have come up with three things I plan to try instead to incorporate more ‘Slow’ into my kitchen.

Long and slow onions and tomatoes

As an Indian, I use so many onions and tomatoes that I often find myself chopping up onions and opening a can of diced tomatoes before I’ve even decided what I’m cooking. While I can’t slow-cook all my food, I’m going back to using my weekends to caramelise my onions and cook those tomatoes low and slow. 

Caramelising onions adds a deep base of flavour of sweet, savoury and extra oomph to curries, stews and my favourite mid-week treat, pies. When it comes to tomatoes, I’ve known that slow-roasting them in the oven helps mellow their acidity until they are deliciously sweet. What I didn’t know until recently is that you could do that to canned tomatoes too! 

While both of these ingredients stay good in the fridge for a week, I plan to take advantage of the cheap summer prices and freeze a bunch of them for my weekday curries. Maybe I’ll go a step further and then freeze those curries too for an endless supply of yum.

Cooking with family

After seven years in the role, I have relatively low standards for what makes me a “good mom”. But one of the dreams I still hold dear is raising boys who love spending time in the kitchen.

The problem is, they currently have a mum that swats them away impatiently because it’s faster and less messy if I cook by myself!

Spring-rolls that we rolled together using our Tandoori Paste

But something’s changed this summer with them turning five and seven. We’ve been practising our numbers by counting the chocolate chips for our pancakes and learning to spell by writing the grocery list. Last Friday the boys “made” their own pizzas for pizza night and as I write this, we’ve spent the morning rolling up and freezing spring rolls I can fry for their lunchboxes once school begins.

Cooking together is now more fun than it is messy and I’m dreaming up things we can easily make with one another like paratha, dahl and maybe, even a curry paste!

Cooking the unknown

Easy, familiar and healthy often sits at odds with exciting. This might explain why I’m bored with everything I cook. I could make my meals exciting by adding piles of cheese or cream to everything I make like Facebook urges me to constantly. Or, I could stop reading my cookbooks at bedtime and actually cook some of the recipes hiding in there. 

Reminding myself that I don’t need a special occasion to cook a Pomfret (Pompano) Pulao for myself

In 2024, I’m challenging myself to take inspiration from the Instagram creator Jake Dryan (@plantfuture) and take a deep dive into regional Indian food a la Julie & Julia, cooking something new from the recipe books weekly. I’m hoping that not only does it make mealtime easier but it also provides fodder for my essays here.

It remains to be seen how many of my slow resolutions I put into practice. What I can say is that a few weeks into my year of slow, I seem to have reignited my love for toodling around the kitchen, even if I’m not very productive.

Maybe this word-of-the-year palaver has some merit after all.

Questions for you!

• What is your word of the year? Bonus points if it’s food-related!

• How might you embrace ‘slow’ in your kitchen?

• When was the last time you toodled around in your kitchen and what did you cook?

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Thank you to

Meryl Rowlands

and

Diana Demco

for their encouragement and edits to get this piece over the line.