Home cooking is a concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last couple of months since my last post back in May.  Since then, I moved from Scottsdale, Arizona back to my hometown of Toronto and in that time, l have lived in 5 hotels, my parents’ house, my inlaws house (AND gone to 5 weddings) before moving into our own loft downtown.  And back in Scottsdale, we were in a temporary furnished rental for 3 months with our things in storage.  So it’s been a long LONG time since I’ve seen a good deal of my stuff.  And with this transient lifestyle, I’ve eaten at so many restaurants out of necessity that home cooking is something I’ve truly been craving.

It’s taken a while for me to get back into the swing of cooking at home.  Time to find new grocery stores, find enough surface area to work on in our open concept kitchen, and find places to store all the stuff we unpacked.  Finally, I feel like I’m there – home.  And ready to get my home-cooking on.  And for me, that means aloo chap – an Indian-Chinese word we use for potato cakes stuffed with spiced ground meat.  It’s one of my family’s specialties.

Aloo is the Hindi word for potato – I thought it was a Chinese word until I was in my 20s.  My first memory of eating aloo chap is going to one of my aunt’s houses a kid, my aunties working away to make a zillion aloo chaps assembly line style, and all of us cousins smothering the little potato rounds in ketchup before stuffing our faces.  My aunts made two kinds – spicy for the grown ups and non-spicy for us kiddies.  I think they must have used entire sacs of potatoes and half a cow to make enough aloo chaps to satisfy our entire family, and to have enough for leftovers to send home with everyone.

Now that I make them at home, I use ground turkey or chicken instead of beef, and gluten free breadcrumbs.  Also, I pan fry them instead of deep frying for both health and cleanup laziness reasons.  I know my adaptations are A-OK since I made these for my parents and they said they were just as yum as the ones my aunt’s make.  This is a MAJOR compliment since these aunties are awesome cooks renowned for their massive spreads of all sorts of insanely delicious eats at our family functions.  And now that I’m back in TO, I can enjoy this regularly.  So happy to be home.

This is some of the cousins at a party sometime in the 80s. I'm absent in this picture... just like I was absent in many pix when I was in AZ. See how sad everyone is??? Except smiley Kim.