Archive for the 'Indian' Category

(Chronologically Listed)

Egg Curry

When you go to an Indian restaurant, the menus at most of them are pretty much the same and its unfortunate because this showcases such a narrow window of this amazing genre of food (honestly, why do so few restaurants focus on South Indian cuisine?). Don’t get me wrong, I love this narrow window as well, but it just means that if I want to satisfy my cravings for the kind of food I had when I was in India, that’s all on me. This is such an attempt to recreate a curry my wife and I both love: egg curry.

Egg Curry

Instead of the usual chicken or lamb, this curry’s protein is diced hard-boiled eggs. The gravy it tomato-based, slightly spicy, and both creamy and slightly sweet on account of the presence of coconut milk. I followed a similar technique in making this as I did when I made butter chicken. The eggs make for a different but somehow, more…
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Posted by mike on May 4th, 2008 under Indian, Main course | 23 Comments »

Floral Mango Ice Cream with Pistachio

My new toy is still new and exciting, so despite the cold winter weather (hey, 40 degree weather is cold for Florida!), I can’t help but make ice cream again this week. Last week’s ice cream was a bit too rich for my wife’s tastes (but spot on for me!), so I thought I owed her a lighter ice cream more tuned to her liking. I went with her favorite fruit: mango.

Floral Mango Ice Cream with Pistachio

With mango as the base flavor, I wanted to dress it up with some other subtle Indian flavors to have a really lively ice cream. So I started with a creamy mango custard and infused it with cardamom and rose water (never used it? It’s just what it sounds like–water flavored with roses, as in flowers!) for sweet, floral flavors that are very harmonious next to the buttery, sweet, almost peachy flavor of fresh mangoes. I like my ice cream to have some additional texture though, so I coarsely sliced…
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Posted by mike on January 28th, 2008 under Dessert, Fruit, Ice Cream/Sorbet, Indian | 17 Comments »

Apple Chicken Curry

I know this one sounds like an odd combination, but somehow, innocent, autumnal kind of ingredients (apple, apple cider, cinnamon, white wine, dijon, golden raisins) come together to produce a curry that could stand up next to any other traditional chicken curry flavor-wise. And so today, we have apple chicken curry.

Apple Chicken Curry

I wanted to make chicken that somehow went with apples, but I had a tough time coming up with something that appealed to me. I wrote down a long list of things that I thought would go well with apple and then started whittling it down until there was a collection of things that seemed harmonious together. From there, I just took all of those ingredients out and just sort of went with it–since ginger and cardamom were involved, why not try to do something with some Indian flare to it? And so I started working in other Asian flavors, such as kasoori methi (a.k.a. fenugreek), and that is…
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Posted by mike on January 22nd, 2008 under Asian, Chicken, Fruit, Indian, Main course, Middle Eastern | 9 Comments »

Orange Tamarind Sweet & Sour Chicken

Since having made butter chicken and discovering an Indian grocery in town, I wanted to try something new and different that also applied some of the new things I’d learned (and bought). The result: an Indian-inspired take on sweet & sour chicken.

Orange Tamarind Sweet & Sour Chicken

I marinated and then broiled some chicken thighs like a typical chicken tikka so as to give the meat a tender, tasty flavor. The sauce is composed largely of orange juice and tamarind. Tamarind is a really interesting fruit, and even if you’ve never heard of it before, I bet you’ve eaten it without knowing it. For instance, it is largely featured in worcestershire sauce and the somewhat liquidy brown sauce you might have at an Indian restaurant (e.g. usually with somosas). Tamarind is kind of citrusy sweet and also distinctly sour, but in a really tasty, interesting way.

What would pair well with citrusy? Why the citrusy sweet of orange juice of course. But if you stopped there, you’d…
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Posted by mike on November 5th, 2007 under Asian, Chicken, Indian, Main course | 8 Comments »

Murgh Makhani (Butter Chicken)

Making a good Indian curry can be a tricky endeavor as there’s a lot of flavors at work, some of which may not be used too frequently in your kitchen. Today’s dish which you may have encountered in restaurants before: butter chicken, a delicious tomato-based curry with a subtle, creamy, buttery taste.

Butter chicken

Now I’ve cooked some curries before, but they were always lacking something or were just really unbalanced. I love Indian food, but to me, if there is any cuisine that is hard to dissect from the finished product alone, its a good curry, which is frustrating because I’d love to cook a lot more of it. Furthermore, its not hard to find recipes out there, its just really hard to find ones worth making. So imagine my delight when I just happened to stumble upon a recipe for butter chicken by Alfred Prasad, the head chef at Michelin-starred restaurant Tamarind (note to self: next time in London, book reservations). I…
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Posted by mike on October 30th, 2007 under Chicken, Indian, Main course, Sauce | 9 Comments »

Indian rice three ways

Indian food commonly has rice as a side dish, among many other enticing things, and there’s a lot of different, delicious ways of pairing rice with your food. My favorite two: lime rice and yogurt rice.

Lime rice and yogurt rice

When I cook Indian food, I usually can’t decide on cooking any one particular kind of rice, so I instead make two different flavored rice dishes and have a little of each. As different as they both look and taste, there’s a lot in common between them, so making two at once is incredibly easy. After lime rice and yogurt rice, the third rice recipe included in this post is much simpler and is akin to something you might commonly encounter in Indian restaurants (which I’ll just call spice rice for lack of any decent name). I tend to not be a big fan (its too plain for me), but hey, maybe you will be. ;-) Another nice thing about these recipes is that they are simple…
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Posted by mike on October 26th, 2007 under Indian, Side dish | 8 Comments »

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