I met my current roommates Anna and Sakeena on Facebook; they were looking for a roommate to replace the crazy girl currently living with them, and I needed a place to live so that I wouldn’t be homeless when school started in September. Sakeena and I first bonded over our mutual failure when it comes to cooking during a Facetime interview to determine if I was good fit to move in with her and Anna. I asked if they cooked meals together (me sneakily trying to see if someone would feed me in oma’s place) and then she told me the saga of her badly burnt pasta (which you can read about below). I told her about how my oma cooked extra meals for me, and I was happy to hear that her boyfriend’s mom does the same for her. Two twenty-something girls failing at adulthood, it was a match made in heaven. I like to think this is the reason she chose me to move in with them but in reality it’s because she really liked my dad. Prior to our Facetime conversation, she met him in person and decided he was the nicest dad she’d ever met and that my family was going to adopt her. Her logic for choosing me was that a man that nice couldn’t have raised a monster, so I must be nice too. The first time we met in person was actually when I came to the house to sign the lease, luckily we ended up getting along really well with each other.
After living with Sakeena for a few months I realized that her and I have a lot of the same issues when it comes to cooking.
1. We both don’t like to fail: If a recipe doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would, we get discouraged instead of learning from the mistake for next time.
2. We are both lazy: both of us don’t like spending a lot of time cooking. Her go to meals are either take out, frozen chicken burgers or pizza; no judgement girl, I feel you!
3. We have the ability to cook if we put in the effort: the two dishes we made together turned out great so it’s definitely possible!
Spicy Shrimp Curry (Serves 2)
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- ½ cup chopped onion
- 1 teaspoon minced green chili
- 1 teaspoon garlic paste
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 ½ tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 teaspoon turmeric
- 2 teaspoons red chili powder
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1/3 cup water
- Small package of cooked shrimp (remove the tails)
- Rice
Directions
- Heat olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Add in onion. Once onion has browned, add the remaining ingredients and let simmer for around 10 to 15 minutes.
- Meanwhile, begin cooking your rice. Prepare enough rice for two people according to the directions on the package.
- Serve curry over the rice and garnish with cilantro.
Tandoori Chicken
Ingredients
- 5 chicken legs
- 1 cup plain yogurt
- 2 teaspoons lemon juice
- ½ teaspoon ginger paste
- 1 ½ teaspoon garlic paste
- 5 tablespoons Tandoori masala
- 1 tablespoon chili powder
- 1 tablespoon Garam masala
- 1 teaspoon cumin
Directions
- Add all ingredients to a medium sized bowl and use your hands to evenly coat the chicken. Cover with saran wrap and marinate at least four hours or overnight.
- Place chicken on a greased cookie sheet and cook in a 400 degree oven for 40 minutes flipping halfway through to evenly cook on both sides.
The verdict
Both dishes we made turned out really well! Sakeena thought the chicken was a little over cooked but I liked it. My favourite of the two was definitely the shrimp curry though, it was spicy and delicious.
Q & A with Sakeena
Olivia: What is your favourite food from your culture?
Sakeena: That’s so hard…. I think my favourite thing from my culture is Biryani which you’ve probably heard me talk about. It’s a type of Indian or Pakistani rice. It’s just so f*king good. The spices that go into it, the meat that’s put in it. I always liked Biryani, but I think when Imaad’s [her boyfriend] mom started making it, it was a whole other level. It’s an Indian and Pakistani favourite. There’s so many viral videos of people singing about Biryani and there’s a video called BU, which is Biryani University. Biryani is really really popular and it’s really well known throughout the culture and you can mix it with anything it’s so good.
O: What’s your favourite food to make?
S: Lasagna because I’m really, really, really good at it. I’m not a confident person so if I say I’m good at something, I’m good at it. And I love making it because the first time I ever made it was with Bianca, my best friend, so it was a good bonding experience. Buying all the ingredients is really expensive though so I don’t make it all the time. And when I make it, the portions are really huge so we would have lasagna for a good week and a half and I don’t know what to do with all that lasagna. That’s the main reason I don’t make it. Plus it makes a huge mess: you have to shred all the cheese, and cook all the meat and sauce and it takes 50 years and you need a lot of patience.
O: What’s your go to lazy food?
S: Frozen pizza is my go to lazy thing. When I’m hungry and I don’t want to spend $15 on take out, and when I just want something cheap and quick frozen pizza is so easy.
O: When did you start cooking?
S: I technically started cooking when I lived downtown in 2014. At that time I looked online, or asked around or asked my mom [how to cook certain dishes]. I actually experimented with food a lot back then which is weird because you’d think I’d do that now but I don’t. I’d look up a recipe, and then I’d go to the grocery store and buy all those ingredients and try something new. I did that a lot and it was a lot of fun.
O: Do you enjoy cooking or do you eat to live?
S: The reason why cooking bugs me a lot is because I find that I was better when I lived downtown. Which is weird because I was younger and I didn’t know as much as I know now in regards to cooking. But when I moved here, I started experimenting again and I kept messing up and it would piss me off so I stopped enjoying it because every time I’d make something it wouldn’t be perfect or it wouldn’t taste the way it did at someone else’s house so I honestly don’t like doing it. And the amount of dishes you have to clean and the amount of mess it makes, I just hate it so much. And if I loved cooking the way some people do the dishes wouldn’t matter. Maybe if we were cooking together and shared the responsibility it would be more fun. But by myself I hate it. If I were to start doing it more and getting better and my food turned out better all the time I’d cook more.
O: What’s your biggest cooking fail?
S: This happened when I still lived with my old roommates. I was on an Instagram food account and I saw this pasta and thought it looked really good and I wanted to try it. It was kinda late at night, stores were still open but I didn’t want to go buy stuff. It needed milk and we didn’t have milk at the time but I thought ‘I’m sure we have things around that I could use or substitute’. I go in the kitchen and my roommate Jess was sitting in there studying and she’s a pretty good cook so I was telling her what I was gonna make and she said ‘yeah you can substitute this for this, it probably won’t taste the same but it’s something’. On our stove we have two settings [hot and super-hot] and I didn’t realize I had turned it to super-hot. I made the sauce and then added the pasta and it was really really hot and I was wondering why it was cooking so fast. The whole house started smoking and I’m like ‘Jess I don’t know what I did, what happened?’ And I had burned the whole pot and it smelled so bad, it smelled like burnt crap, I know you can’t use that other word. The whole house was smoky and the fire alarm went off. The pot couldn’t be cleaned, it was brown and black and we had to throw it away. Jess felt so bad for me so she said ‘just sit down, I’ll make you pasta’.
O: Who is the best cook you know?
S: My boyfriend’s mom. She’s the best, sorry mom! My mom’s a great cook but my boyfriend’s mom is on another level, she needs to open her own restaurant, no one understands why she hasn’t. She makes everything well, there’s not one thing she doesn’t make perfectly. Meatloaf isn’t an Indian thing or a South Asian thing, but she wanted to try and make it and she made it healthier. The first time she made it she said ‘this is not how it’s gonna taste every time, I’m testing it and next time will be 20 times better’. Oh my God since the second time it was delicious. As she likes to say ‘I am a scientist’ so she knows every little measurement that goes into it and she has really good judgement. But I can’t say there’s one specific meal I like the most. And her presentation skills are on another level. If she’s made food that’s red she will make sure it’s not in a red plate, it’s not around red things because she wants that to pop out. She’s very particular. If she makes vegetarian dishes, she’ll put it on a separate side, sometimes with a green mat underneath and she’ll label everything with green.
Eat Pray Liv 