Stories from my time in adda and chicken 65.

+ losing weight.

Chicken 65

Some days I yearn for my old line cook job in Adda. But then not really, because I was the only women in the restaurant and the manager was a bit terrible. Or maybe a lot of terrible. But having a bad manager in food service is taken for granted. He was nasty. But my coworkers were pretty good.

I’ve talked about one of them, a dude with a French background. Unfortunately he didn’t last long. He didn’t know how to cook rice properly and had some weird ways to peel ginger that ended up with a lot of waste. I remember the manager’s wife sitting me down, telling me that they fired the guy. Then, because there was only two of us the option was to close down or shift my responsibilities to cook. Which I happily agreed to.

Anyways we struggle for a couple days till they hired Kevin, a transplant from Kerala. Kevin was great, younger than I. A fresh grad out of the local cooking school here, and eager. We played around in the kitchen when the boss was away, and even though he was from the southwestern tip of India, his chicken 65 was killer.

Chicken 65 is said to have been established in the kitchens of the Buhari Hotel chain. And I’m not sure if it is meant to have 65 chili peppers in it or that it requires 65 different ingredients, but oh my is it delicious. Here’s a good recipe.

Now that I’m out of the kitchen, I’ve been making it at home. And maybe a bit too often because I’ve started to put on weight. I mean, it’s fine I swear but maybe I realized that I’m eating it too often because I constantly have a medium saucepan with oil, sitting on the cooktop, just waiting to be used. And frankly there was a time where I was eating it about every other day. That was mainly due to the stress of my job, I just wanted to come home and eat something familiar, you know?

I’ve put on maybe ten kilos, which is a lot on my frame. So I’ve started asking around my friend group if anyone knows about anything fun to do after hours, especially since it’s summer in here and the winter is just around the corner. My friends mentioned they like to play pickleball, and that it’s easy to book a court with pickleball booking software. So I’ve started to do that, once the sun sets, it’s been so hot and humid lately. Us Bengalis like to eat dinner late anyways, so stepping out around 9pm to catch up with friends and play a bit is definitely a healthier choice that eating fried chicken every night.

 And I’ve gently weaned myself away from fried chicken… but as anyone knows it’s hard living/eating outside your culture. And food offers such a sense of security and nostalgia. And I know I can make the masala and just not deep fry the chicken. So maybe I’ll try that for a bit.