The sights, smells, and sounds in Asha Gomez’s kitchen are so alluring, so mouthwatering, that when we finally sit down at the table to eat with her husband, Bobby, and her friend Bill, it takes me a moment to notice that there isn’t any silverware.
“Utensils aren’t big in Kerala,” explains Gomez. “We eat with our hands.”
When she sees my worried look she adds, “It makes the food taste better.”
Let’s rewind for a moment. Gomez is the proprietor of the Spice Route Supper Club, a tribute to the region where she and her husband are from: Kerala, a state in southwest India. When Gomez talks about Kerala, her big blue eyes light up. “The Arabian Sea is on one side, the Indian Ocean is on the other side. Everything there is lush and vibrant.”
That includes the food, which Gomez re-creates with passion, inspired by her memories of the communal home where she grew up with her mother and her mother’s sisters, who would prepare breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner day in, day out.
“There was magic in that kitchen,” says Gomez as she begins prepping the ingredients for the first dish she’s going to teach me, Beef Ularthiyathu.
Magic implies fantasy, but the food Gomez makes is very real. She uses only fresh curry leaves, which she calls irreplaceable. “Curry leaves and curry powder have nothing in common,” she tells me. “In India, we don’t have curry powder. It doesn’t exist.”
As Gomez drags her fingers along the length of a curry stem, dropping the leaves into hot oil, the fragrance begins to fill the room, and Gomez tells me, “That’s the smell of Kerala.”
The senses have always been important to Gomez, who for years ran an ayurvedic spa in Atlanta. After massaging her clients, she would ask them if they were hungry (her apartment was right next door, so she always had food handy). It got to the point where clients would call to ask what Gomez was cooking that day before making their appointments. This pleased Gomez, who saw food as a natural extension of her job: “Food culminated the experience beautifully. We nourished their bodies.”
In addition to touch, smell, and taste, the visual is important to Gomez. “I like things to be beautiful,” she tells me. Her plates are all white and she uses different shapes for different dishes. When she makes her thoren, a stir-fry of carrots and green beans, she doesn’t add turmeric because she doesn’t want it to turn yellow.
At last, the food is cooked—in addition to the beef and the thoren, there’s yogurt rice—and we’re at the table, about to eat with our hands.
Bobby shows me how to compact the rice into a patty that can then be used to scoop up the beef and the thoren. At first, I must confess, I’m wishing I had a fork. But eventually, I get the hang of it: I scoop some rice, beef, and vegetables, and as the food travels from my fingers into my mouth, there’s nothing getting in the way. This is what it means to be connected to your food—something that only happens when you engage all your senses, which is an easy feat in Asha Gomez’s kitchen.
“It’s all about connecting to your food.”
Serves 2
Upon my arrival at Gomez’s home, she immediately offered me a glass of chai tea, which she poured from a beautiful silver tea service. The secret to a good chai (which means “tea” in Hindi; therefore “chai tea” is “tea tea”) is very simple: you have to buy whole cardamom pods. It’s their pure flavor and their flavor alone that makes chai taste like chai. Once you buy them (and they’ll last for a while), you can use them to flavor other things too, such as oatmeal.
1 cup whole milk
1 cup water
8 cardamom pods*, crushed
4 tea bags of black Darjeeling tea
¼ cup honey, plus more to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg
In a small pot, combine the milk, water, and cardamom. Heat over a low flame and simmer, gently, for several minutes until the liquid is infused with the cardamom.
Add the tea bags, bring to a boil, and then turn off the heat. Let the tea steep for several more minutes.
Strain the tea into mugs and add honey to taste. Grate fresh nutmeg on top and serve.
Serves 4
“It’s our beef bourguignon,” Gomez said about this dish when we first made it together. Yet there’s a lot more going on here than with a traditional beef stew: you have the subtle perfume of the fresh curry leaves; the powerful punch of ginger, garlic, and chilies; and the nuanced shadings of the coriander, garam masala, and turmeric. When you first add the beef to the pan, it may all look a bit dry, but put the lid on and 5 to 10 minutes later you’ll lift it to discover lots of liquid: the meat gets braised in its own juices. Serve with the yogurt rice and thoren, and make sure to eat it with your hands!
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons coconut oil, plus 2 more tablespoons for later
2 stems of fresh curry leaves* (see Resources)
1 red onion, sliced along the length of the onion
Kosher salt
1 thick 2-inch-long piece of ginger, peeled and grated (¼ to ½ cup grated ginger)
6 cloves garlic
3 dried red chilies
½ large red tomato, sliced
1 heaping teaspoon mild cayenne pepper
2 heaping teaspoons ground coriander
1 heaping teaspoon garam masala (see Resources)
¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
3 pounds top round beef*, cubed, rinsed and patted dry
Place both oils in a large skillet and turn the heat to medium. When the oil is hot, stem the curry leaves right into the oil and add the stems too. Cook (they should sizzle) until they start to brown, 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Add the onions and a pinch of salt and cook until the onions soften, 2 to 3 more minutes. Then add the ginger, garlic, dried red chilies, and tomato. Season again and stir, then add the cayenne, coriander, garam masala, and turmeric. Taste and adjust; you may want to add more cayenne for color and heat. Cook for another 2 minutes, just until the tomato begins to release its juices.
Add the beef and turn up the heat. Stir until the beef is well coated and the liquid comes to a boil. Cover the pan, lower the heat to a simmer, and cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Taste the beef: it should be tender. If not, keep cooking. When it’s finished, turn up the heat to high and scrape up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan, incorporating them into the beef and the pan sauce*. Add the final 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, stir, and serve immediately.
Serves 4
When you don’t have a frame of reference for a recipe, it can seem very exotic and even scary. That’s how I felt about thoren—an unexpected combination of green beans, carrots, garlic, cumin seeds, and shredded coconut—until I made it and served it on a plate next to Gomez’s beef and yogurt rice. In that context, suddenly its role on the plate became very clear; thoren is the “peas and carrots” portion of an Indian square meal! Except this recipe will flip any memory you have of waterlogged frozen peas and carrots on its head. Here everything is bright, flavorful, punchy, and crunchy too—peas and carrots with pizzazz.
3 big cloves garlic, peeled
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
½ cup shredded coconut (from the refrigerated section, not sweetened)
1 finger chili*, sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons coconut oil
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 stem of curry leaves (see Resources)
15 long green beans (you can use haricots verts), stems discarded, chopped into ¼-inch pieces
3 large carrots, peeled and chopped the same size as the green beans
Kosher salt
With a mortar and pestle, pound together the garlic and cumin seeds. Add the coconut and the chili and continue to work until everything is relatively blended, though not mashed to pieces.
In a large skillet, heat the oils over high heat. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to start popping. When they do, strip all the curry leaves from the stem into the oil* and then add the stem too. Add the green beans and carrots and a big pinch of salt and stir.
Add the garlic mixture and stir. Add a pinch more salt and cook just until everything is flavored but the vegetables are still crunchy. The only way to know if the thoren has the texture you like is to taste it. Adjust for salt and serve it up.
Serves 4
Rice, by itself, is normally a vehicle for something else. Not so here, where rice is cooked, fluffed, and then added to a pan of olive oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves, and yogurt. Suddenly the rice is a perfumed, slightly sour event all on its own; and as a vehicle, it’s a moist, tangy foil to the spicy beef it’s meant to accompany. You can serve it hot right when you make it or serve it later at room temperature.
1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water
Kosher salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 stem of curry leaves (see note)
1 cup plain yogurt
In a large pot with a lid, add the rice* to the water with a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil over high heat, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, for 12 minutes on the lowest flame.
Remove from the heat and fluff the rice with a fork.
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet until hot, and then add the mustard seeds and curry leaves, gliding them off the stem, and the stem itself.
When the seeds start popping, add the yogurt and turn off the heat. Remove the stem, add all of the rice, stir, and either serve right away or allow it to come to room temperature and serve. It’s best to eat this the same day that you make it.
