Max McMullen Clark is one of London’s rising young chefs. Nancy and I know him through our close friendship with his grandparents, Debbie and Jeremy McMullen. You caught a glimpse of Jeremy, now, alas, deceased, here (scroll down for the glimpse), and, more recently, Debbie was our companion and expert restaurant guide when were in Paris together all too briefly last year. See here and here. Debbie and Jeremy begat Ben and Katy, two very lively children. They all stayed with us for a few days once years ago. Highlights of the visit were Ben and Patrick getting into a fist fight in the White House during a tour, and at our house discovering what happens when you throw slime — the goopy toy — into a rapidly rotating ceiling fan. With that background, Ben naturally became a school principal.
Ben’s son, Max, expresses his considerable energies through multiple channels, including digital media — being aged, I started to say film — and cutting-edge gourmet cooking. The Blog is delighted to bring to you the premier of his cooking channel.
As Max notes, this particularly recipe is especially good for lockdown. Unlike with our last recipe, here you should have almost all of the ingredients in your cupboard. The dish includes 3 cans of chick peas, 2 cans of tomato puree, 3 onions, a large red chili, 1 1/2 lemons, a good sized hunk of ginger, and ground coriander, cumin, and turmeric. The finished curry is served over rice with some chopped fresh cilantro and cooling plain yogurt as accompaniments. The dish is gluten free and, if you use soy yogurt, vegan. This is the Blog’s first vegan entree, and possibly the first non-dessert that does not include garlic — cutting-edge cuisine indeed.
As a special treat, you can see Max prepare the dish from start to finish here in a video worth many thousands of my words.
A final note: the recipe and video are an outgrowth of a school assignment to demonstrate the use of imperative verbs. Many of us have an aversion to imperative verbs, which we hear all too often. Max manages to soften them with grace and enthusiasm. The Blog welcomes him at the dawn of a great career.
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