Cookbook No. 7 – Honey, I Coked the Curry!

This month I was just busy living my life, when suddenly it hit me: I hadn’t completed any goal of my list this month! I hadn’t forgotten about them. On the contrary, I was actively working on goals every day. But they were all long-term goals. Letting March pass without actually completing one of them, would be such a shame. Reaching a goal makes it all feel so much more worthwhile! So I scrolled down my list to find a goal that I could complete today and there it was:

No. 65 – Cook with coke.

It may seem like a weird goal to many of you, but I can assure you, I hadn’t lost my mind when I made it up. As you may remember from this goal, I’m a coke lover. In fact, I was a coke addict up until a few months ago, before I decided to tone it down a little. So it may not surprise you that I got overly excited when I saw this cookbook lying in a store a few years ago:

It’s a cookbook about coke! It’s even shaped as a coke bottle! Can it get any cuter? This funny little book is filled with recipes in which one of the ingredients is coke. Apparently, it’s not only delicious as a drink! I had to have this book, obviously.

But even though I was very thrilled to try out the recipes in this book, for some reason I never did. The book ended up as a dust collector in my bookcase. And when I moved to my current home, the book got lost in one of the many unpacked boxes in the attic. But my curiosity never died. So when I created my list, the desire to find out what coke would taste like in a dish came back.

I decided to cook Caramelized Pork Curry. Can you already guess what I had to caramelize the pork with? Yes, coke! I had to reduce the coke together with some caster sugar on the stove first. It was such a weird sight, to look at this black fluid bursting with foam, induced by the sugar, and all the bubbles of carbonic acid escaping the mixture. I felt like a true Hermione Granger. But once the mixture had thickened and I could add it to the meat, the magic ended and I became a regular cook again.

To my surprise, I suddenly realized there were no vegetables in my frying pan. I was stunned. How could I not have realized this when I closed this recipe? And what was the writer of this cookbook thinking, coming up with a recipe that contained no veggies at all? Luckily I had a fridge stuffed with bell peppers, so I quickly added one to the frying pan.

It took me a long while to make this dish, most of which was waiting while it simmered, but finally the time had come to taste it. Feeling a little apprehensive, I moved a fork towards a piece of meat drenched in coke sauce. And it was so brilliantly delicious! The dish had a sweetness over it I had never tasted before. The combination of coke, onions, coconut milk and curry powder was truly epic!

Because of all the coke and the sugar in the dish, I had expected to gain weight today. I was prepared to make this sacrifice in order to reach this goal. But to my surprise, I hadn’t gain weight at all. The Scale even told me I had lost a few ounces overnight! I cannot understand how this happened, but I’m not complaining, of course.

I can’t wait to cook this dish again, or to try out the other recipes in this book. The only problem is that Ruud didn’t like it at all. So for me to taste this extraordinary dish again, I’ll have to invite some volunteers next time…