Making Memories

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellow,

Today I made a curry base with Abi!

The idea was that I would make enough for a kumara curry tonight with her and then for a chicken korma tomorrow with Caro. 

So basically two nights of curry for me. I am very considerate like that. 

"Will this be like the chocolate mousse?" Abi asked.

And my heart just about MELTED. 

Back in 2005 when Abi was six and Libby was five, they came to stay with me in Edinburgh, along with their mum and dad. I decided to make my signature dessert, chocolate souffle. You may have tried it yourselves. 

It is pretty damn good if I say so myself. I serve it with ice-cream and fruit and it is light and fluffy and amazing. 

Of course you have to make meringue as a key component. I had pre-separated the egg whites for the girls and asked them to help me make the meringue part. 

"But FIRST we have to make CLOUDS!" I told the girls, because I was full of sh*t as are all indulgent uncles. I showed them the egg whites. 

"A key ingredient of clouds is the breath of little girls," I told them. "You have to breathe into it, breathe! Breathe!" 

Cue lots of excited huffing and puffing from the girls while their parents looked on, rolling their eyes. 

"If you try this with the breath of little boys," I went on, "it comes out tasting like farts and poo." 

They liked that.

Then we went on with the rest of the recipe. I melted some chocolate and got Abi and Libby to help stir it which was VERY exciting for them because chocolate. But as I recall Abi got burned and this caused her to cry and I felt awful because I HAD BROKEN ONE OF MY NIECES.

But fortunately, we soon had chocolate dessert! Yay!!! Bad Uncle Symon is forgiven yayyyyyyyyy.

Everyone ate them and told me how amazing they were*.

It made me SO happy to know that this memory had STUCK in there! I mean, how much do YOU remember of life as a six-year-old? But there it was, shining like a new penny in Abi's memory, twenty years later. 

She makes me melt like ice cream on a hot souffle.

We had a GREAT time making the curry base. I pretty much made her do the whole thing and just pointed at ingredients while making OO-OOP noises to indicate that now it was time for this or that ingredient to go into the pan. Abi really seemed to enjoy it and loved all the smells of the spices. 

Because it's just a base, it is pretty boring. But once it was done, I told her we could have fun and just plop whatever spices and ingredients we wanted into the kumara curry. She was fascinated by the chaat.

"Not until the end," I told her. "Step away from the chaat." But everything else was fair game. Soon the house smelled amazing and Caro experienced curry fomo when she got home. She was getting boring old salmon for her dinner. Soz Caro. 

We sat around and laughed and chatted and I wondered if Abi would remember making a curry with her full-of-sh*t uncle in another twenty years' time. 

I hope she will. 

S.

* Except they were lying. Twenty years later I found out the girls hated them and thought they were gross and bitter, although they liked the ice cream and the strawberries. Even though I am now in my 50s and they are in their twenties, my heart broke.