Got some more Indian recipes for Christmas. Today I tried some. Cooked rice as I usually do: Fry cinammon, cardamom, and cloves, add rice and water, let it cook until the water evaporates, then let it cook some more until the lowest layer of rice starts to slowly caramelize – when it is yellow or light brown, take the rice from the hearth, scrape the burnt rice from the bottom of the pan, and serve. Yummy. Only this time I forgot the salt. Ouch!
I tried some Masoor Dal according to recipe, but it was no good. My usual mix is better (2004-10-08 Cooking and India). Maybe there are typos in this recipe, too. It starts out with 200g of Masoor Dal and 1l of water, for example. That’s about twice the amount required, I think.
They used ½ tea spoon of ground ginger, 1 tea spoon of turmeric, 1 tea spoon of jeera, 2 tea spoons of fresh coriander leaves, 1 tea spoon of ground coriander (I didn’t have any, so I took more of the fresh coriander leaves), ⅛ tea spoon of hing (asfoetida), ¼ tea spoon of chili. It was not too tasty. Not enough salt, too much water – cannot judge the rest of the mix.
I also made some fish curry, Macchli Kari; I was not too happy with it. It seemed to lack a certain something. I also lacked a certain ingredient, so perhaps next time it will be better. I usually don’t like to use fish for cooking since Switzerland has no sea coast at all and buying fish seems a bit pervert... Anyway, we used jewfish (Zackenbarsch), and it was very good. The recipe says to use 800g of fish, and we had about 550g. Plus 2 tomatos, 2 potatos, 2 chilis (which I didn’t add on account of Claudia’s hot-o-phobia), 3 tea spoons of mustard powder (probably the essential ingredient I was missing – I used black mustard seeds instead but that was probably the wrong substitute), 2 tea spoons of turmeric, 2 tea spoons of jeera, 2 tea spoons of sweet pepper (Paprika), 2 tea spoons of ground ginger, 4 soup spoons of yogurt, salt.
We also prepared some yogurt mint sauce, Dahi Poodina. The recipe says to use 50g of fresh mint leaves, 200g yogurt, ¼ tea spoon chili powder, salt, ½ tea spoon ground cumin. It was ok. Instead of just cutting the mint leaves, I’ll put them through the electrical grinder, next time. The leave pieces were a bit too big.
And for the non-locals reading: Here in Switzerland neither mint nor coriander are something you usually use. I had to buy both at the Indian shop arround the corner. Googling for the name of the shop I found that they are rather big... Amazing. ¹ I also found a community site where they write about the shop (in German). I posted a comment, too. ²
#Cooking
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Hmm. I’ll probably be trying out some curried fish with coconut milk and some other stuff soon. If it works, I’ll let you know. If it doesn’t, I’ll come back here and delete this comment. 😄
– NoufalIbrahim 2004-12-28 10:28 UTC