Christmas Curry

Richard emailed me awhile ago, and said that one thing he would like to keep of mom’s is a couple of her curry bowls.  This is the set.  She took a pottery class back in 1980 and 1981 at our local community college, and she made them for our Christmas curry.  Isn’t the glaze pretty?  Of all of the things I’m keeping of my mom’s, I think these are my favorite.  They’re lovely to look at, and she made them herself, and they bring back memories of meals shared together as a family.

When we lived in Alaska, my mom worked two jobs…first as a Montessori teacher, and second (because it’s practically impossible to support yourself and two young children on the salary of a Montessori teacher…they make much less than even public school teachers make) as a waitress.  The chef at the restaurant, Jerry, was also our roommate, and he had a recipe for curry that my mom LOVED.  You made a batch of chicken curry, with coconut milk and TONS of spice (very, very hot), and I could swear that there was a banana mashed into it as well, and you served it with rice, and a lot of condiments, so that everyone could choose whatever they wanted to add.  So the biggest bowl in the pictures is the rice bowl, and the one in the center is the meat bowl, and the rest would hold condiments.  When we were kids, the curry was MUCH too hot to eat (it was the kind of curry that would make your nose run and your ears ring and your eyes water and your face turn bright red), so we would just eat the condiments, which included peanuts or cashews, shredded coconut, diced apples, pineapple chunks (maybe, not sure on that one), raisins, chutney, and I don’t know what else.

This is around Christmas, 1987.  I had moved to San Francisco for college that year, so I’m not in the picture.  Linda is on the left…we met Linda and her daughter Jennifer in Fairbanks, and she was sort of a second mother to me growing up.  My mom in the center, and then Richard and my Great Aunt Flo on the right.  Grandma must be taking the picture, because she’s not in it.  It’s not Christmas Day, I’m sure, because I know they spent that at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, but the back of the photo says December 1987.  I looked at the largest size on Flickr, as I can see more detail there than I would be able to on the picture itself, and gosh, it doesn’t look like they’re eating curry to me.  It looks like regular Thanksgiving or Christmas food.  I wonder what the story is there?  Thanksgiving leftovers, and the pictures developed in December?  Hmmm.

Now I have the big bowl displayed on our bookshelf, one on my desk with paperclips and so on, and a couple tucked away.  I just sent Richard a couple, and my cousin Jenny a couple, and I’m saving a few for my Uncle and my Grandma.

Don’t ask me for the curry recipe, because I don’t have it.  I think it was more of a Jamaican curry, as it had coconut milk in it.  It was too hot for human consumption, so we stopped having it a few years later.  I don’t know if Mom, Richard, and Kathy started up again in Juneau, but somehow I doubt it, as Richard doesn’t like food as hot as I do, and no one likes it as hot as my mom did, with the possible exceptions of Linda, and of course, Jerry, who taught them how to make it.

I was just surfing the internets, looking for curry recipes with condiments and banana mashed inside, and I came across this blog, with pictures of the condiments.  Interesting, and pretty!