Monthly Cooking Thread - May 2019

[miss marmelstein]

My favorite cuisine! Now that we no longer own a home in NJ - with the largest population of Indians - we have only one small Indian grocery here. But it is very well-stocked! The papadoms are fresh and delicious - we hold them over a grill or a burner with tongs and let them curl into peppery deliciousness.

I always buy the DEEP brand frozen breads, usually naan. So much better than the ones you buy in the bread section of fancy gourmet shops

Tomorrow my eggplant chutney.

[Jamestown1630]

Tomorrow my eggplant chutney

I'm looking forward to it! Eggplant has a very delicate, almost-not-there flavor of its own, but I love it, and it's wonderful for sucking up other flavors.

[Fai Mao]

How about some Chinese food?

The God of Cookery
https://youtu.be/l8_Mk3-sZsQ

[miss marmelstein]

My eggplant chutney is so simple a little kid could make it:

Buy an eggplant and peel it and cut into small squares. Do the same with an onion and any vegetable lingering in your crisper drawer about to go off. If you have any fruit like a pear or apple, do the same. Raisins are a must! Golden is preferable. Take two or three garlic cloves and a nub of ginger and grind it in a mini-processor.

Put some oil in a pan and start sweating the onion. Then throw in the veggies, garlic-ginger, apples and cook until they are softened. Now throw in huge hand fulls of garam masala or curry powder and extra cumin if you are in the mood. I’m always in the mood for cumin. If your powders don’t have fennel, add some of that as well. I like red chili flakes to hotten it up but fresh chilies are good, too.

Cook it down which may take about a half hour or longer. It is actually eggplant slush and probably would send an Indian cook into a rage but it is delicious and can be eaten hot with fake tandoori chicken or salmon.

[Jamestown1630]

That sounds like a tumultuous and exhausting film!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_of_Cookery

[Jamestown1630]

That sounds wonderful! I have a complex relationship with fennel, and might go very light on that...

[Liz]

You might be lucky enough to find an Indian sweet shop.

Indian sweet shops display fantastical, neon-colored, silver-laced Indian desserts, known as mithai...not for the faint of heart—Indian cuisine is all about big, bold flavors, and their sweets are no exception. With few exceptions, almost all mithai are tooth-achingly sweet, and most can be boiled down to two main ingredients: some sort of sugar (raw, syrup, jaggery, etc.) and some sort of milk (liquid, solid, condensed, etc). While mithai vary across India, many boast flavors we've come to expect with Indian cuisine: mango, cardamom, rosewater, and various nuts. Indian sweets are a total steal: most are priced by the pound, which means you can sate your sweet tooth for a few dollars.

[Stand Watch Listen]

You may be interested in the SixSisters Stuff site for Instant Pot cooking/ recipes

https://www.sixsistersstuff.com/ website

or their YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/SixSistersStuff

[miss marmelstein]

Leave it to me to forget the APPLE CIDER VINEGAR!! You must balance flavors with chutney and there I go forgetting the sour. I also forgot brown sugar but that’s another story...

[miss marmelstein]

Beautiful photo, Liz, and a nice variation on all those pretty color photos you get with French macaroons!

I don’t go for Indian desserts myself but always get stuck with their rice pudding at restaurants.

[Jamestown1630]

Do you put brown sugar in it? I figured the raisins would seep their sweetness in...

[miss marmelstein]

I do and then balance it with the vinegar. That is kind of standard as are the raisins. But if you don’t like that much sweet, leave it out. It’s such a forgiving recipe it practically has Alzheimer’s!

[Jamestown1630]

LOL!

[boatbums]

I can't say Indian food is a favorite of mine. We went to an Indian restaurant (tricked into it, pretty much by vegetarian friends) for their buffet. We ended up ordering Tandoori chicken on the side for some protein. Just not a fan of some of the main spices they use (i.e., cloves, cardamom, turmeric or anise). I guess the closest I come to it would be using curry powder in a cold chicken salad with grapes and pecans. There are a few curries we like but we are wimps WRT heat. There was a British restaurant we frequented that served a good chicken curry but even the "mild" was a mite too spicy. Our friends would order extra hot! I guess you develop a taste for it.

[Liz]

If I was served a basmati rice pudding blanketed w/ pistachios
w/ a side of deep-fried puri (bread), I would not refuse such a dish.

[lizma2]

You run my favorite thread on FR.

BUT..... Can some day we get an appetizer thread?

[lizma2]

Anything Italian benefits with fennel.

[Jamestown1630]

That’s my favorite kind of food - I can make a meal out of ‘horse divers’ or ‘antojitos’.

Will do, soon.

[miss marmelstein]

I’ve never had the fried bread! And some restaurants (think 6th St., NYC) are stingy with the pistachios. Indians often serve desserts like rice pudding with a thin sheet of edible gold. I never been able to purchase it though I’ve asked.

[Liz]

Garnishing foods with silver and gold......an homage to the bejeweled grandeur of the maharajahs?