Spicy Chicken Lentil Curry Stew with Rice

I have always liked telephones.

Not talking on them, necessarily.

The telephones themselves.

When I was a kid, we had a beige rotary phone in the kitchen with a cord that could stretch nearly halfway across the room. My mother would sometimes find me turning the dial just to watch it return.

There was something satisfying about it.

You turned the dial to seven.

Let go.

Click-click-click-click-click-click-click.

Then it stopped exactly where it was supposed to.

Every time.

I liked that.

By the time I was in high school, push-button phones had become more common, which I thought was an improvement even though I missed the sound of the rotary dial.

I once took apart an old telephone because I wanted to know what made the bell ring.

I did eventually get it back together.

It never rang quite the same afterward.

My father noticed.

We didn't discuss it.

Years later, that interest in phones unexpectedly turned into a career.

For quite a while I worked at one of the larger call centers in the Midwest, eventually becoming the night shift manager.

People sometimes assumed I must have been good on the phone.

I wasn't especially.

I was good at knowing what all the phones were doing.

There is a difference.

I knew which lines were busy, which queues were backing up, how long people had been waiting, which agents were on break and which ones had been on break for eleven minutes when their break was supposed to be ten.

Eleven minutes is not ten minutes.

That sounds obvious when you write it down.

Apparently it was less obvious at 2:15 in the morning.

I liked the night shift.

The building was quieter.

The fluorescent lights seemed less aggressive somehow.

There were fewer meetings.

And most problems had answers.

If twelve calls were waiting and six people were available, you moved people around until the numbers made sense again.

I found that comforting.

One of our supervisors was named David.

He had very neat handwriting.

I remember that because he used to leave me notes at the beginning of my shift, and every letter looked almost exactly the same size.

He also wore very nice sweaters.

I'm not sure why I remember the sweaters.

Anyway.

Night shifts had their own rhythm.

Around midnight somebody would usually order food.

Pizza was common.

Chinese food was common.

For a while there was a restaurant nearby that stayed open unusually late, and occasionally someone would come back with containers of curry.

That smell traveled through the entire office.

You could be sitting forty feet away looking at a call queue and suddenly smell cumin, ginger and something warm and spicy coming from the break room.

It was completely different from everything else in the building.

The office smelled like carpet, copier paper and coffee most of the time.

Curry won.

Years later, the smell of cumin hitting a warm pan still reminds me of those overnight shifts.

It's strange how memory works.

I don't remember most of the calls.

I don't remember our monthly numbers.

I don't remember why anyone needed customer service at three in the morning.

But I can still picture the little red lights on those phones.

And David's sweaters.

This stew started because I wanted something warm with lentils and chicken, but with enough spice that it didn't taste like the sort of food someone eats simply because lentils are supposed to be good for you.

The red lentils break down while they cook and make the broth thick without needing cream or flour. Tomatoes add a little acidity, and the chicken goes in near the end so it stays tender instead of simmering itself into submission.

The lemon juice at the end matters more than you might think.

It wakes everything back up.

I serve the whole thing over a little rice.

There are quite a few ingredients, but once you've measured the spices, the pot mostly takes care of itself.

Which is something I appreciate.

A good system should.