cook Indian food

This weekend, I made madras-style chicken curry. it was very easy, but it had about 20+ ingredients! My friends loved it, and so did I! I used my new cookbook – Feast of India, by Rani.

I love cooking Indian food, and I have recently seen “Punjabi Tinda” (pumpkin?) at the Asian grocery store. Does anyone know how to cook it in an authentic way?

I found one at the parks and rec department in Sunnyvale when I lived there. It was an interesting class and we made some good dishes. I only cooked a few of the things at home after that, but I still had a good time in the class.

I followed a recipe for Eggplant Curry and Spicy Chickpeas. The chickpeas were much more flavorful than the curry, though. The curry would have benefited from more spice. It needed a bit more flavor. I ended up mixing the chickpeas into the curry to achieve the desired spiciness. However, I can safely say I accomplished this goal. I now know what to do for next time!

Well, I stole a recipe from allrecipes.com for Mulligatawny soup. I chose the one with the ingredients that I could get in the area but that was mainly due to time constraints. I got the tandoori chicken recipe from the George Foreman girll manual. I must say…both came out quite well.

However, I only know that Tandoori chicken is the most accurate of the bunch but not the Mulligatawny. I never had that….but my mom liked it all the same so that’s the important part. But it was so very good….

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.

A friend and I cooked Indian food today. We cooked Matar Paneer and Veggie Briyani and warmed up Nann. The only thing was…we used the premade spice packets that we got from the Indian store. Everything came out pretty good and after a quick research for the conversion from grams to ounces…we were on our way.

I kind of want to go it solo and maybe next time I will try and do it without the whole prepacked spices.

Why does Jason not care for Indian food? Even good Indian food, not the garbage that I make. Now I can only work on this while he is away.

Make sure you use enough spices – not necessarily the hot-chili spices, but cumin, coriander, garlic, ginger, etc. Don’t rely on those crap little spice containers from Safeway – they’re overpriced and likely to be stale. Either get them in bulk from a natural-foods store, or in larger packages from an Indian store. Oh, and spices taste much better if you cook them in some oil, particularly at the beginning, than if you just throw them in at the end.

Eat it with your hands, scooping with bread – tastes better that way. Share with someone you love.