Corn and Potatoes With Mustard Seeds and Mint (Bhutta aur Aloo ke Mazedar Tarkari)

Not the best Indian recipe ever, but it was probably my corn's fault. That or my tomatoes. This could be a very acidic dish or a very sweet one, so it's worth another shot in corn season. I'd also really appreciate someone else trying it and letting me know how it goes. I love a recipe that tells you to make it as hot as you can stand. That's what Madhur Jaffrey says to do here. Hurray.

oil
black mustard seeds
cumin seeds
garlic clove, diced
Some potato(es), boiled and cut into small cubes
1 or 2 diced tomatoes
fresh cilantro, diced
fresh mint, diced
1 hot green chili (I used a red one. Maybe that's why it wasn't as great as it should have been?)
2 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels (make this recipe with frozen for convenience and fresh if you've got some spare time on your hands...)
3 oz coconut milk (I used almond milk so it wasn't as thick and creamy. Maybe also why it wasn't so great. Use a shot glass to get the 3 oz. I'm a Newfoundlander and so I had a 3 oz shot glass hanging around...if you're not lucky enough to be from Newfoundland you will have to add a few shots together. Don't worry, it's just coconut milk...not coconut rum)
1/2 tsp salt
large pinch of cayenne
1 tbsp lemon juice (this felt like too much)
fresh ground pepper
2 tsp roasted and then ground cumin seeds (stick them in a frying pan over medium heat until they start to have an aroma, then remove from heat to an electric coffee grinder or mortar and pestle, and grind. Optionally put them in a paper or plastic bag, close the opening of the bag, and smash with something large...)

So first you want to boil the potato. You need to peel them afterward but you don't need to do it in advance. If you boil them until they're soft (this depends on how big they are) and then rinse them in cold water their skins tend to peel more easily, I've found. If you peel in advance I think you lose some nutrients. You can also chop them in quarters to boil them faster, but then it's harder to peel and you lose nutrients. Not much harder, though. So it's your choice.

While they're boiling chop everything else and have it and all the spices measured and ready to go. This recipe goes fast.

All that are left to chop are the boiled, drained and skinned and potatoes, so do that and then heat a good few tbsp of oil in a large skillet on medium-high (Normally I would never use this much but you need it all to give the potatoes a nice crispy exterior. If you don't mind mushy potatoes don't use so much oil, but it really makes a difference). When hot, put in the mustard seeds and a big pinch of un-roasted cumin seeds. When the mustard seeds start to pop put in the garlic and potatoes. Stir for a few minutes and then add the tomato (or tomatoes, if they're small), cilantro, mint and green chili (You can use a fair bit of each fresh spice. A good handful of fresh leaves of each). Two minutes later add the corn.

Stir until the herbs are mixed through the corn and then add the coconut milk (or almond milk. To make the almond milk thicker like coconut milk you could also put 6 oz of it in a saucepan over medium-high heat and let some of the water evaporate out of it until you have only 3 oz left. This just concentrates the flavour. Voila, evaporated milk. You can also just use water instead of coconut milk or almond milk, but again, not the same. Like the difference between sorbet and ice cream, it's a big one. Not necessarily bad, and sometimes you want sorbet and sometimes you want ice cream, but it's your choice and there'll probably be more flavour overall with the coconut milk). Also add the salt, cayenne and lemon juice now. I didn't know it was okay to add lemon juice this early in a recipe since it's so pungent and I think it's loses its pungency if you cook it for so long, but maybe that's the intention here??
Bring the skillet to a simmer. This should just take a few seconds, but turn up the heat if it doesn't happen soon. Then reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the skillet, and let it simmer for 3 minutes. Don't overcook the corn. You just want to heat it through. If the corn is really fresh it probably only needs about 2 minutes max.

While this is cooking put the 2 remaining teaspoons of cumin seeds in a small frying pan over medium-high heat (don't use any oil) and cook them until they're fragrant and slightly browned, just a few minutes. Then grind them. If you don't have a convenient grinding device like a coffee grinder, make sure you don't save this step until this late in the dinner game. Your corn will over-cook while you're fussing with a plastic bag and mallet of some kind.

Now uncover the skillet, grind some black pepper over top along with the roasted and ground cumin seeds. Stir. Serve. Voila side dish.

Affordable Taste: An Indian Dinner of "Dry" Moong Dal

A food friend once told me that in his opinion the only vegetarian food in the world worth eating is Indian. I don't fully agree. I do hate tofu and soy of all kinds, but there are a whole lot of other good vegetarian food options out there, even if North American vegetarian restaurants tend to disagree (I'm looking at you "Fresh" in Toronto and "Aux Vivres" in Montreal). There's Ethiopian, Mexican, South American, French, and Italian, to name a few prime examples, but I understand my friend's point. Meat (fat) gives flavour. It's easy to make a meal with meat delicious without doing too much. Vegetable oil and other kinds of oils just aren't as naturally delicious as meat fat, so vegetarian food has to work a little harder. Indian food (very similar to Ethiopian) brilliantly uses complicated blends of spices to flavour otherwise dull things (lentils and beans). Even so, using the same spices to flavour meat is astronomically better.

Like eating out every day, though, eating meat at every meal because it tastes better is just not sustainable, both financially and physically. Your body needs a respite from time to time. Look at cultures that involve traditional fasting. All sorts of religions incorporate a set period when the body can clean itself out, either by restricting times of the day you can eat, or what you can eat. The same goes for the spices in food. It's all traditional. People who make the food that way may not know why certain spices go together, but they sure know it tastes good and it's healthy for them. Who cares if ginger is good for the immune system so a hunk of it goes in Vietnamese soup? Meat is a treat, and maybe people would eat more of it if they could afford to do so, but not every body is designed to function at its peak that way. Everything in moderation? Unless you're a monk, or a vegan...

Anyway, my point is that if you just think Indian is the only good vegetarian food out there, you're limiting yourself. Ethiopian, for example, is very similar, using slightly different spices in the same way. Coincidentally (or not) there was a large migration from India to East Africa (mainly Kenya) to build railroads and I'm not sure who brought what spices where, or where traditions originated, but the end result is delicious. Chile peppers, turmeric, fenugreek, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon (have you ever seen a cinnamon tree? You want to lick the bark), and most importantly, salt. Nothing against a perfect batch of baked beans, corn and squash tamales, or a traditional vegetable minestrone or fresh pasta, but Indians and Ethiopians got this whole spice thing figured out.

With that in mind, I made a healthy dinner. I generally don't make a bunch of Indian dishes in one night because it's labour intensive. Instead I'll make make one the first night, the next night I'll make another and eat it with leftovers from the first night, and maybe the third night I'll make another and put all the items together for a true Indian meal. Here's what I made: "Dry" Moong Dal ("Sookhi" Moong Dal), Corn and Potatoes with Mustard Seeds and Mint (Bhutta aur aloo ki mazedar tarkari), Gluten-Free Bread (to replace naan, since the dry dal was supposed to be served with bread, not rice) and raita (plain, thick yogurt to help digest the lentils with the bread. Complete protein and all).

I find lentils boring on their own, but the little bit of sugar in the bread made them absolutely savoury and delicious. Naan would also work perfectly, and on the third day I had the lentils with some leftover kulcha (like a naan, but yeast-free. Not lactose-free) from an Indian restaurant I'd gone to in Parc Extension, Indian Maison Curry House.

The dal is a really easy recipe.1 cup moong dal (this is not moong dal above...I used these green lentils instead. It's a different taste, but definitely not a bad one)
About 5 cups of water, divided
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp cayenne (never skimp on this...)
2 tsp oil (...or this...)
1/2 tsp salt (...or this, in the case of lentils, since they're bland enough already)
1 tbsp oil or ghee
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1 dried red chili

Wash the dal like you would rice, in several changes of water. For real moong dal you're supposed to soak it for 3 hours, but these lentils don't need to be pre-soaked for so long, so just stick them in 4 cups of water until you need them later in the recipe. Drain them before adding them below. If you skip this step and the lentils don't absorb enough water, you'll just need to add more later to make sure they cook fully.

Combine the 1st four spices (up to the cayenne) along with a tbsp of water in a small cup.

Heat the first amount of oil over medium in a large pot and when it's hot put in the spice mixture. See, you don't need a lot of oil because the spices have water mixed in. It will be harder for you to burn them. Stir the spices for a second (for once the recipe doesn't say something like "For 5 seconds". It just says "Stir once", which I think is still hilarious. What if I accidentally stir twice? and what constitutes a stir?) then add drained dal. Stir and then add a cup of water. Bring the mixture to a boil and reduce the heat to very low, cover the pot and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Depending on your type of dal and whether or not you soaked it long enough you may need to cook it longer or add more water. Just make sure it always stays at a simmer but doesn't start to stick to the bottom of the pot. "Very" low can also be misleading and end up causing you to wait more than patiently for your lentils to cook.

Now the fun part.

Just before you're ready to eat (aka the dal is tender, "dry" or not too liquidy, and not sticking to the pot) heat the remaining oil or ghee in a small frying pan over high heat. You want this to be VERY hot oil so don't use olive oil. The heat is necessary to extract as much flavour as possible from the spices. You're basically going to create spiced oil and use it as a seasoning.

So add the cumin seeds to the hot oil. Count to 3.

Add the hot chili. Count to 3 again. It should puff up and darken. If not, just count to 3 and get on with your life/recipe.

Now pour the oil, cumin seeds and chili right over the pot of dal and stir it in. You can also place the dal on individual serving plates and pour a small amount of the spiced oil over each portion as a garnish, or just place the whole pot of dal with the oil on top on the table and serve family-style. I recommend mixing it in, though, because it lets the spices blend, so you don't end up with some people having bland bowls of dal and some having spiced ones. You can also fry some very thinly sliced onions in a few tablespoons of oil on medium-high until they're crispy and browned, drain them on paper towels, and serve them on top.

Serve with some kind of flatbread (or my gluten-free bread, or anything that isn't a piece of whole wheat, comes in a bag, or is sandwich bread. This is not a French meal) and some yogurt to help the digestion. Mango for dessert? I got 14 at Jean-Talon and biked them home. Soon I will start a series called "What did Amie bike home from Jean-Talon this week?". Half a watermelon, 14 mangos, 5 oranges, 4 peaches, 2 bunches of asparagus, a bag of lettuce, and a canteloupe. Thank you Leonardo's. If only you were at Atwater.

Basmati Chaaval (Perfect Basmati Rice): Madhur Jaffrey's "Indian Cooking"

"The Ill-est Meal I've had since Christmas" - Ed Squires, dinner guest

This post is actually all about rice. You see a lot of other dishes in the above photo, but rice is definitely the central point of any Indian meal. When you eat rice every day like in South-East Asia, it becomes an art form in itself. I make sushi. The rice is the most important, most complicated, and longest step. I also lived with an Indian girl for half a year, and even though she didn't cook very often, when she did she always made rice. Perfect rice. The kind that's tender and fluffy (never over-cooked), and the grains don't stick together. No rice cooker. Just experience to the point where it became second nature. To make it poorly would have been difficult. We got along very well, but this was not something we had in common. I covet her rice skills.

Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking has four basic rice recipes. Four! That doesn't even count the spiced rices, rice with peas, pullaos, and an authentically elaborate recipe for biryani. Kind of like every good French chef can make broth, every good Indian chef (and most mothers) can make perfect rice. I am not an Indian chef.

I bought the best rice. Indian Aged Basmati from Rube in St. Lawrence Market. It already smelled like cooked rice before I even turned on any heat. The aromatic was incredible. Delicious popcorn. I put my 3 cups of rice in a pot, covered it with water and gently moved the rice kernels around with my hand until the water turned cloudy. Then I poured off the water into a strainer (to catch the escaping rice), returned the draft dodgers to the pot, added more water, swirled, strained. I did this 5 times, since the recipe said 4-5 times. I decided to err on the side of caution.

Then I added 7 1/2 cups of water to the drained rice in the pot, and let it soak for 30 minutes. This keeps the rice separate when it cooks (in theory). I then drained the rice again.

Back into the large pot went the adequately drained rice, and 4 cups of water. I brought it to a boil, covered with a lid, turned the heat to VERY low (like I was supposed to) and cooked it for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes I lifted the lid to fluff the rice with a fork, only to discover the rice was starting to stick to the bottom of the pot! I got scared. It was still supposed to cook for 5-10 more minutes!

What do I do...what do I do?

3 options:
1. Add more water and let the rice cook longer. Water should not be added at this stage, though. You risk creating mushy rice. This option seemed like a good idea, though, because probably the rice needed more time to actually cook thoroughly. Probably the heat had been too high and the water that the rice was supposed to absorb had just evaporated. I didn't want under-cooked rice.
2. Turn off the heat now, set the rice aside, and eat it as it was, maybe a little under-cooked.
3. Do exactly what the recipe said and put it back on low heat for another 5-10 minutes, fully expecting the rice on the bottom of the pan to burn.

I took the first option. This way I'd definitely get cooked rice, but maybe over-cooked rice. That's just what happened, sadly. The rice became mushy and stuck together in big chunks, like jello towers of rice. It kind of wobbled, even. I broke it up with a spatula (I could have cut it into geometric shapes, it was so gelatinous...) and put it in a serving dish. The upside of this story is that the rice was going to serve as a bed for all the other sauce-y dishes, so it wasn't the end of the world. If I was serving grilled fish or meat on top, I would have been in trouble. The nice thing about Indian cooking is the stew-like consistency of most of the dishes. Nobody minded the mush rice. All my guests were overly Canadian and were all too polite to be offended by or insult my poor rice cooking skills. Hurray.

The next dish...yogurt...is not cooked. Thank goodness. There was hope that I would not mess this one up.