shrimp curry

December 5, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer we had been steadily working our way through the stunning book 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer, but we’ve slacked off a bit of late. Everything from that book has tasted fabulous, but much of it, like a lot of Indian food in general, is very unphotogenic and so not very conducive to blogging.

This week we ended up needing to cook one more dinner at home than we had planned, so I went looking for a recipe that could be made from just what was in the freezer and pantry. This shrimp curry was just the ticket, since we had the last of a bag of frozen shrimp needing to be used, there was a bag of dried grated coconut in the cupboard, fresh cilantro left over from a Thai stirfry, and everything else is a standard pantry item for us. We scaled the recipe down to match the amount of shrimp we had. Continue reading →

butter chicken

October 13, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 1 Comment

I picked up a wonderful book last month with my Village Books birthday discount, called Fat. It does my heart good (while, no doubt, clogging my arteries) to look at all the beautiful pictures of pork fat and cracklings. And shortbread. And bacon sandwiches. Mmmm.

I was feeling oddly guilty about having not made anything from the book yet, and decided that I would pick one thing to try, just to start out: butter chicken.

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spiced okra

September 5, 2008 ~ admin ~ Leave a comment

It was pointed out to me that, despite the number of times our household has eaten Indian-spiced okra in the last year, I have so far failed to do a post on it. Well, let’s just fix that, shall we?

I was not an okra eater, growing up. It’s a hard vegetable to grow in the Pacific Northwest, even east of the mountains – it just needs too long of a growing season – so it’s not very common as a fresh vegetable in the stores. I was fed a bowl of okra gumbo in New Orleans when I was nine years old, and thought it was the nastiest, slimiest thing I had ever eaten. I didn’t try it again for years.

I believe it was my father who first found a recipe for spiced, pan-fried okra in a Julie Sahni cookbook and fed it to us. We fussed and made dubious comments, but then ate some…and kept on eating, because this is incredible, unexpectedly delicious stuff! Instead of being slimy and glutinous, the okra cooks dry and becomes a little crisp, a little tender, delicately flavored and with a delightful pop from the seeds. Cooking it Indian style often means adding a dry spice mixture of cumin, coriander, and cayenne, and sometimes rings of green chile pepper, which go really nicely with the okra’s flavor. We’ve tried several different recipes, and it’s delicious no matter what we do. The two of us can finish off a pound of frozen chopped okra fairly quickly this way. Who knew? Now I’m an okra fiend.

Honestly, even if you think you hate okra, try this. Really. You might be surprised.

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grilled eggplant with Indian spices

August 13, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 1 Comment

We wait with great anticipation all year long, waiting for the summer to bring both grilling weather and fresh local eggplant. Once it’s here, we make this recipe repeatedly, regardless of the flavors of the other food we’re eating – it’s just so good.

The recipe is from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, although I don’t believe we’ve ever made it quite like the original – it calls for using very small baby eggplants, stuffing them and frying them whole. We prefer slicing slightly larger eggplants (Japanese or Italian, doesn’t matter), coating them in the spices and oil, and grilling them until soft. So all we’ve really borrowed here is the spice blend, and it’s a good one. Continue reading →

the joy of someone else's cooking

July 9, 2008 ~ admin ~ 2 Comments

You might well say that I have no business posting this dish. I didn’t pick out the recipe and I did none of the cooking; in fact, I came home from work late one evening and it was all finished and waiting for me! And not only did he cook, he took pictures! Yes, I have a wonderful husband.

Dinner was a chicken curry with a coconut-cilantro-chile-mustard seed sauce, served over basmati rice with a side of spiced okra. The sauce was really tasty, very rich and spicy with a strange impression of peanut butter (maybe that was just me?). The chicken was so tender it fell apart when we touched it with our forks. We would definitely make this one again. Continue reading →

the joy of someone else’s cooking

July 9, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 2 Comments

Indian Feast 2008

April 25, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 2 Comments

Back when I was a freshman in college, I took a class on the history of India. Partway through the term, our professor hosted a dinner party at her house, featuring traditional Indian foods. I volunteered to be part of the cooking team, and learned how to make chai, pop mustard seeds and fry potatoes. The rest of the class arrived later, ate a vast quantity of everything, drank chai and all fell asleep on the professor’s living room floor. I think some of us had to be carried back to our dorms.

Inspired by that experience, for a number of years now we’ve hosted an event at our house, formally dubbed the Quasi-Annual Skagit County Indian Feast & Hike (QASCIFH?) As you might expect from the name, it involves a hike followed by a lot of home cooked Indian food. We’ve found that a brisk walk in chilly weather helps work up a good appetite and keeps us awake longer. We don’t usually go far – maybe 2 to 4 miles – but it’s a fun outing, with the prospect of good food at the end.

We usually hold this event early in the year, when weather is uncertain, but usually it works out pretty well – we’d never had to cancel on account of weather. Enter spring 2008. The day of the party it snowed. And hailed. And rained. And snowed some more. We all stood inside staring out at the ice pellets as they poured down and skittered across the sidewalk, and decided that drinking wine and eating pappadums was the better part of valor. So no hike this year, save for a small excursion around the block during a sunbreak. Continue reading →

asparagus with ajwain and ginger

March 13, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 3 Comments

Local asparagus still isn’t here, but when I stopped by the co-op yesterday to pick up something for dinner they had the most beautiful bundles of organic Mexican asparagus – I couldn’t resist. We were feeling a little hankering for Indian food, so I roasted a pork tenderloin that I had rubbed with salt, pepper, cumin and paprika, and cooked the asparagus with ajwain, fresh ginger and amchoor (green mango) powder, like the green bean recipe from Madhur Jaffrey.

In case you were wondering, this is what ajwain looks like, piled up next to some (larger) cumin seed. We bought our current supply at a small Indian grocery in the Pike Place Market. Continue reading →

saag paneer & dal

January 24, 2008January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ 2 Comments

This whole soft-food thing has been a great brain exercise for us. I’m feeling like I’ve eaten enough white carbs to do me for a while, so thinking of things that are soft and flavorful but NOT bread/pasta/rice is a real challenge. I managed a small bowl of chili at a restaurant last weekend and realized that beans are my friends – soft, nutritious and full of protein. We decided to make red lentil dal for dinner, one of the softest and most comforting foods out there. To round it out, we made one of our favorite Indian dishes, saag paneer (spinach with panir cheese). Panir is the tofu of India: bland on its own, but a great foil for and absorber of strong flavors.

I love saag paneer not just because it’s softly spicy and full of cheese – it’s also really easy to make, assuming you can buy panir at your local shop like we can. If you have to make it from scratch…well, in that case, you might want to make something else (unless you have better luck making cheese than I do). Same with the greens – you could certainly buy a bunch of fresh spinach, but this is a dish where I think it’s better by far to just pull a bag of chopped spinach out of the freezer.

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curry & parathas

December 10, 2007January 15, 2013 ~ admin ~ Leave a comment

One disadvantage of this otherwise rather nice town is that there is not a single Indian restaurant. During the time we’ve lived here there have been two: a decent enough place attached to a motel that turned into (yet another) Mexican restaurant a couple years ago, and a really great place with a real tandoori oven, which turned into an office furniture shop. Now there’s nothin’. This is part of the reason we cook so much Indian food at home. Besides, it’s fun.

We had friends over last weekend, and fixed up a pretty standard set of dishes to take care of any Indian cravings: red lentil dal, basmati rice, spiced okra, flatbread and chicken curry. The bread and the curry were (pretty safe) experiments: I made paratha for the first time, and the curry was the Chicken Simmered in a Tomato Sauce (very straightforward title) from Meena Pathak’s book.

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