Indian Feast 2008

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.

asparagus with ajwain and ginger

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.

saag paneer & dal

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.

curry & parathas

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.

Cookbook: Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen

This little book is a powerhouse of Indian cooking. It’s small, it doesn’t lie flat, it has no pictures (except a few line drawings), and it’s far from comprehensive, but this one book revolutionized Indian food for us. Not right away, though.

It was a gift from a friend many years ago, after I had already given J a copy of Yamuna Devi’s Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking, and we felt (rather smugly) that we had everything we needed for cooking Indian food. But if you’ve ever used the Devi book, you may have noticed that her ingredient lists are enormous, her instructions are tiresomely exact, and she puts a somewhat intimidating weight on the history and context of the food. We had the book, but I mostly used it to make flatbread and hot yogurt drinks to go with our Patak’s Curry Paste concoctions. Spice Kitchen sat on our shelf, unappreciated.

Then one day we opened it.

Black pepper chicken curry

Earlier this week, knowing we wouldn’t be eating dinner at home again for a while, I looked at the vegetables lurking in the refrigerator to see what needed using. A bunch of slightly faded Tuscan kale got eaten for breakfast (with a fried egg on top, yum), which left a bag of cute little cauliflowers, slightly spotted with brown, from our last trip to Dunbar Gardens. Cauliflower usually leads to one of two things around here: cauliflower gratin or Indian gingered cauliflower. We wanted to go the gingered route, so I went combing through our multitude of Indian cookbooks to find something to go with it.

Indian soup redux

Remember that Indian meatball soup made from leftover curry broth a couple weeks back? We ate all the meatballs out of it (funny how that happens) and there was plenty of broth left, so I froze it. And remember the delectable pork and dal? I froze the leftovers of those, too. On Monday I grabbed all those containers and dumped them into a pot and heated them up together, then added a diced zucchini from our garden and called it dinner. Fantastic. I’d make it again if I could figure out how.

Delectable pork & rai masala

One of J’s very favorite things to cook is a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen (a super nifty little book) called, appropriately, Delectable Pork. It consists of pork chunks braised in highly flavored liquid which is then reduced to nothing but a very highly flavored coating on the pork. The meat is tender and spicy and goes great with rice, chapati, yogurt, vegetables…it would probably make a great sandwich, too, although I haven’t tried that yet. When J made this for dinner last Monday, he discovered we were out of rai masala, which is a key flavor component, so he made more:

 One batch of rai masala is made by toasting:

• 2 Tbsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds
• 1 tsp brown mustard seeds
• 1 tsp whole peppercorns
• 1-2 hot dried red chiles
• 5 cloves

Indian meatball soup

Leftovers are a wonderful thing, especially when you can use them to create a totally new dish. It tends to lead to exceptionally flavored food that cannot be replicated and can’t be written as any useful sort of recipe, as in: take one container of cumin-seasoned pork broth from the freezer, mix in a container of  cauliflower simmered with ginger and turmeric from last Wednesday and last night’s chicken meat that was roasted with fresh bay. Find some canned beans to throw in there, too.