August 17, 2010: 'Lamb' korma pilaf

Cindy came home from Global Green with a bag of faux-lamb and a plan. She'd been excited about Camellia Panjabi's lamb pilaf for some time and a bag of frozen 'lamb' seemed like the perfect excuse to give it a try. We supplemented the faux meat with a handful of mushrooms and otherwise stuck reasonably close to the recipe.  It's a fair bit of work, although I managed to squeeze it in pre-netball on a Tuesday night (give yourself 90 minutes or so I guess). The results? Aromatic and amazingly full of flavour but texturally a bit challenging - the fake lamb turned out much tougher than we hoped, making the meal authentically chewy. Still, the combination of the rich clove and cinnamon flavours and the sharper chilli and ginger bite, made this a winning recipe. We're already plotting to have another shot at this with a less meaty filling - possibly just mushrooms, or maybe a combination of eggplant and mushies. We'll keep you posted. The main thing to note is that this is a wonderfully spicy treat and our first effort was almost the perfect winter meal - we just need to work on the texture.


Lamb korma pilaf

400g basmati rice
4 onions, chopped finely
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, minced
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 green chillies, finely chopped
5 cloves
5 cardamom pods
1 5cm cinnamon stick, broken into pieces
600g faux-lamb
400g mushrooms
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1-2 teaspoons chilli powder
1 teaspoon mace powder
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg powder
100ml yoghurt
3 tomatoes, chopped
2 teaspoons salt
2 bay leaves
a few strands of saffron
a splash of milk

Wash the rice and leave to soak in cold water for 30 minutes.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a big pot and fry the onions until they're soft and medium to dark brown. Add the ginger, garlic, chillies, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and fry for a few minutes. Add the 'lamb' and mushrooms and stir-fry for a few minutes, until it's well coated in the onions and spices.

Add the spice powders (coriander, cumin, mace, chilli and nutmeg) and mix well. Add in 1/4 cup of water and stir, simmering for a couple of minutes.

Add the yoghurt, tomatoes and salt to the pot, stirring through. Cover and leave to cook for 15-20 minutes, adding water if everything dries up. When everything is cooked, it should be thick and spicy and not a runny, saucy gravy.

Drain the rice and put it in a pot with an equal volume of water and the bay leaves. Bring to the boil, add the turmeric, salt and a splash of oil and simmer uncovered, until the water has been soaked up and the rice is about 3/4 cooked.

Soak the saffron in the milk and set aside.

Take a large casserole dish and brush the bottom with oil. Put half the rice in the bottom and spread evenly. Add the spiced lamb on top and smooth it out, before adding the rest of the rice on top. Cover and cook at 160 degrees for 20 minutes (until the rice is completely cooked).

Remove from the oven and sprinkle the saffron/milk over the top before serving.

March 12, 2007: Punjab spinach vegetable curry

Continuing our celebration of SBS's Hooray for Bollywood series, we settled in on Monday night with 'The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey' and this curry. Again, the inspiration came from Camellia Panjabi's '50 Great Curries of India', a book that is focussed predominantly on meaty curries. Luckily, the curry sauces all sound wonderful, and can easily be applied to vegetarian alternatives. The basis of tonight's curry was a lamb spinach curry, with a marinade and a spinachy sauce. We swapped lamb for vegies, mainly potato, with a few mushrooms and carrots for colour and variety. I think we went a bit overboard on the spuds, so the marinade and spices had too much work to do to spread their flavours fully around, leaving the whole thing a little blander than I'd like. Luckily we're well stocked with chutneys and pickles to liven things up - it would have been hard going to get through dinner and three lunches of slightly tasteless curry. I think we could probably go with something more suited to a marinade next time - tofu or seitan or something, and pay a little more attention to the sauce-to-solids ratio to ensure the flavour at the end justifies all the hard work.

Punjab spinach vegetable curry

3 potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 cups mushrooms, halved
2 carrots, diced
3 cloves garlic
2 green chillies
2 inch piece of fresh ginger
200ml yoghurt
2 teaspoons cumin
200g spinach leaves, washed
2 bay leaves
6 cardamom pods
2 cloves
2 medium onions, chopped
1 teaspoon coriander powder
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons oil

To make the marinade, puree the yoghurt, ginger, garlic and chillies in a food processor, along with one teaspoon of the cumin powder. Marinate the carrots, mushrooms and potatoes in this mixture for as long as possible - we gave it about an hour, but it could have done with longer.

The next step is to sort out the spinach - you'll need to wash your food processor in between these steps so you can puree the spinach into a liquidy mush. First of all, blanch the spinach for a few seconds in some boiling water and then drain it. Then zap in the food processor and you're ready to go.

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Throw in the bay leaves, cardamom and cloves and fry for a minute or two. Add in the onions and fry for about 15 minutes, until they're nice and soft.

Add the corainder powder and the cumin powder and a splash of water. Stir everything together and cook for a few more minutes. Tip in the marinated vegetables and cook for about five minutes, until everything is well combined. Add in the tomato paste and the chopped tomatoes, along with a cup of hot water and the salt.

Simmer for as long as it takes for the potato to go nice and soft - about half an hour or so. Add in the spinach puree and stir everything together for a couple more minutes of cooking. When it's all done, serve it up on freshly fried roti bread with a few spoons of chilli and lime pickle and settle in for three hours of Bollywood entertainment.

February 13, 2007: Vegetable pistachio korma

It had been over a month since we'd last had Indian - an unthinkable gap given my particular obsession with it - so I spent Tuesday morning scanning our cookbooks for a winning recipe. Cindy's a bit of a korma fan, but the vegetarian option in Mridula Baljekar's book has never really impressed me. Luckily, there's a chicken version in one of our other Indian books that looked like it could be easily converted to a mixed-vegie version. The korma used pistachio nuts rather than the usual cashew option, which gave the picture in the recipe book a rather startling green colour. Mine ended up a more traditional colour, but the flavour was quite impressive. Pre oven-baking the spuds and the eggplant was a wonderful idea - both soaked up the curry flavours particularly well and their softness was a nice contrast to the crisper carrots and beans. If anything, I'd probably cut down on the potato a little next time and add in an additional vegetable. Capsicum maybe. It's a fair bit of work for a school night, and it's probably better suited to a Sunday evening cooking session, but it's my favourite korma recipe so far.

Vegetable pistachio korma (adapted from the chicken pistachio korma in '50 Great Curries of India' by Camellia Panjabi)

4 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 eggplant, chopped into bite-sized pieces
2 carrots, chopped
A couple of handfuls of green beans, trimmed
2 onions, chopped finely
100g pistachios
1 piece of ginger, grated
5 cloves of garlic, minced
6 green chillies
5 tablespoons cream
3 tablespoons yoghurt
2 tomatoes, choppped
1 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 teaspoon cardamom powder
1 teaspoon ground pepper
2 bay leaves
600ml 'chicken' stock

Oven bake the potatoes (about half an hour) and eggplant (20 minutes) at 180 degrees. Pull them out when they're cooked right through, but before they've crisped up on the outside too much.

While they're baking, get to work on the pistachios. Shell them and then boil them in a cup of water for about 10 minutes. Once they're done, drain them and let them cool. The dark skin on the nuts should rub off fairly easily once they've cooled down (this was actually fairly slow and painful, but the cookbook says it should be easy), leaving you with slightly soft, greenish nuts ready to turn into sauce.

Combine the pistachios, four of the chillies and the cream in a food processor and blend until you've got a fairly smooth paste. Mine was only a pale green, but I think it depends on how brightly coloured your pistachios are.

Once the vegetables and the paste are ready to go, you can get cooking. Fry the onion until they've just started to colour and then add in the garlic, ginger, garam masala, turmeric, pepper, fennel seeds and bay leaves. Stir fry for another couple of minutes and then add in the pistachio paste.

Stir in your vegetables (throw them all in together, the eggplant and potato should be soft and you want the carrots and beans to be fairly crisp) and then add the tomato, yoghurt and stock. Keep on cooking until your accompaniments (roti bread for us!) are ready and then you're good to go. Enjoy!

September 13, 2006: Michael’s Mangalore

When we left Brisbane, Cindy was given this book as part of her going away present and I finally decided it was time to try out one of the recipes. Most of the vegie recipes seem to be intended more as side dishes than as fully balanced meals and I think the idea is to make a couple of different dishes and feast on the variety. However, given it was a school night, I decided just to adapt the Cauliflower and Potato Mangalore in the book into something with a few more colours in it. This was all further complicated by the presence in our fridge of a big pile of roast vegies from Cindy’s crazy cooking weekend. Anyway, let’s just jump straight to the recipe.

Michael’s Mangalore

Ingredients
Vegie oil
1 can of coconut milk
1 tray full of roast vegies (carrot, potato, pumpkin, turnip and mushroom)
A big handful of green beans (trimmed)
A head of broccoli (cut into florets)
1 large onion (chopped)
5 cloves of garlic (crushed)
A 2-inch piece of ginger (minced)
1 teaspoon of tamarind concentrate
5 dried red chillies
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
½ teaspoon mustard seeds
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1 cinnamon stick
5 or 6 cloves
1 teaspoon of turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cumin (I’d have liked to use cumin seeds, but there were none at the shop)
1 teaspoon paprika

1. Fry the onion in a good splash of vegie oil until it goes soft and then put it aside
2. Fry the chillies, coriander, mustard and fenugreek seeds, peppercorns, cinammon stick and cloves for about a minute
3. Put the onion and spices, turmeric and cumin powder and tamarind concentrate into a food processor and whiz them merrily until they’re all smooth and pastey.


4. In a large saucepan, fry the garlic and ginger in some more vegie oil for a few minutes. Add the spice paste and fry for a few more minutes. Add ½ cup of water, the coconut milk, roast vegies, broccoli, beans and a pinch of salt.
5. Cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid thickens up a bit and the pumpkin all but disintegrates (about 15 minutes).


Serve with rice and, if you’re lucky, home-made chapatti.


I think I overdid it a bit with the tamarind concentrate and underdid a few of the spices, so the curry tasted mostly of tangy tamarind, which wasn’t really a problem, but something to keep in mind for the future.

Categories

• Cooking
• Savoury