How To Cook Indian project - Dishes 39-43

 

Another week, another set of dishes. Let’s see what we cooked up this week!

Aloo Anardana Kulcha (Stuffed bread with potato and dried pomegranate seeds - pages 449-50)

I’ve been wanting to branch out from just the chapatis I’ve made in the past. So I flipped to the breads section and this was the first recipe on the list. Once again, there was way more stuffing than was necessary for this recipe, so I had a lot of left over stuffing. I probably should start reducing the number of potatoes that I use for these recipes.

I found the kulcha to be a bit harder, less soft and fluffy than I’ve seen in restaurants, so I’ll need to work on my recipes, see if there’s something I can do for future kulchas.

Tomato Rasam (Tangy tomato soup - page 59)

I kept passing by this recipe and wanted to see what it was all about. How was it different than the Tomato Saar, that I made a few weeks ago? And what is a rasam? Well, that’s a spice mix, so it’s another item from the basics section that I’m not counting towards the dishes I made (page 31).

This recipe was also confusing to follow, because steps 3 and 4 both talk about using liquid saved from an earlier step. But it’s never clarified how much liquid one would use in each step. I ended up using all the liquid in step 3 and ignoring that part in step 4.

This was also the first time I did anything requiring “tempering”. And wow, does that add to the flavor. I loved this dish, probably one of my favorites I’ve made so far. I will happily make this dish again. The tanginess is amazing. It’s so different than anything I feel like I’ve eaten before.

Broken-Wheat Upma (wheat version of a popular breakfast snack - page 107)

There are two "Upma” recipes next to each other in the book, and I kept passing by them, wondering what they were. This week, I decided to find out.

Wikipedia says that upma is a like a breakfast porridge. This dish wasn’t very watery. To me, it seemed more like a spiced quinoa dish. It was ok, but a little dull, especially next to the tomato rasam!

Aloo Chokha (spicy potato dish - page 229)

I couldn’t figure out which vegetarian dish to make, so just went to the first recipe in that list. I felt like it was an Indian mashed potato dish. Again, next to the tomato rasam, this was a little dull. I made my normal reductions of the red onions and green chiles (by half) and should have done so for the potatoes as well.

Kashmiri Gushtaba (lamb meatballs in a yogurt curry - pages 368-9)

I like lamb, and I like yogurt, so I thought I would really like this dish. I found the preparation tiring though. You chop up lamb into little pieces, then tenderize them until they are very soft, such that you can make meatballs out of them. Why couldn’t I just use ground lamb and save myself a bunch of time? The only think I kept telling myself was that I was doing this to learn traditional Indian cooking techniques.

I was worried the meatballs would fall apart in the yogurt curry, while cooking, but they didn’t! In the end, it turned out ok. It was interesting but not amazing.

 
Starting from 1’o’clock and going clockwise: Tomato Rasam over rice, Kashmiri Gushtaba, Aloo Anardana Kulcha, Broken-wheat Upma, and Aloo Chokha.

Starting from 1’o’clock and going clockwise: Tomato Rasam over rice, Kashmiri Gushtaba, Aloo Anardana Kulcha, Broken-wheat Upma, and Aloo Chokha.

 

Disclaimer and links: As I can’t just post the recipe from the book (I guess I don’t want to get in trouble over copyright) I am including links to similar recipes. That said, I didn’t make the linked recipes, so I can’t vouch for them. I’m only including them in case you want to make something similar, but don’t want to buy the book.

 
Pooja Mathurhowtocookindianproject, soups, vegetables, bread, breakfast, lamb, curry