Playing with Spices - something good for your potatoes (part II)

A new week, a new couple of challenges in the kitchen. For the last seven days I looked for simple yet healthy recipes, that are self sufficient. This happens all the time when I don't have too much time for cooking: one meal might be enough, but it should be a good and nourishing one.

The star of the week were the potatoes, that have the advantage of being prepared very fast. All you need to do after is to add a little bit of spices. 

This portion of potatoes can be prepared within 40 minutes. It serves around 3 hungry citizens. After I roasted the potatoes in the oven at 250C for 30 minutes - the shapes can differ from plate to another - I added pistachio oil, 1/4 teaspoon Cayenne pepper and 1/4 teaspoon Gram Masala - a spice that I am more and more in love with. Mix it well and leave in the oven for another 15 minutes at the same high temperature. To be served with a healthy portion of cherry tomatoes and avocado. It goes very well with Greek yoghurt too. It is good cold or heated at medium temperature.

As a side dish, I prepared the other day some salmon, with some Thymian salt from Jamie Oliver and 1/4 teaspoon of ground cumin/coriander. 

The next recipe is very rich in ingredients and spices. I was looking for ideas putting on trial my cooking skills and with enough spices to make the fridge and the kitchen smell beautifully. At the end, I decided to use two recipes from the famous German Curry cookbook (pp. 34-35). 

Ingredients: 

8 big potatoes

250 gr. tomatoes finely cut

6 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/4 tablespoon chilli powder

1 fresh zucchini cut

17 small mushrooms

1/4 teaspoon tumeric 

100 gr. salted cashews

100 gr. veggie margarine

2 slices of fresh ginger

7 small curry leaves

150 ml. pistachio oil

parsley, on taste

Serves: 3

Preparation: 1 hour

Directions:

Roast the potatoes and the chilli powder in the oven at 250C for 20 minutes. 

The garlic and tumeric are fried in a pan with 1 teaspoon of pistachio oil for around 6 minutes at 150C.

Meanwhile, get the tomato sauce out of the tomatoes in the mixer, at medium temperature, for maximum 2 minutes.

Fry the zucchini with the mushrooms in a pan at 150C for 10 minutes. Add the garlic and tumeric, the cashews, the margarine and the ginger. Mix well the ingredients for another 5-6 minutes. Add the curry leaves and the tomato sauce and mix for another 3 minutes. It is very important to mix everything well in order to create the good mixture of tastes and flavours. 

At the end, add the potatoes and mix for another 10 minutes at 150C. 

Add the parsley leaves.

To be served hot or cold, with or without side dishes, preferably some veggie salad or any kind of meat. 

A glass of white wine goes together well too. 

Bon Appétit!

I was offered a pack of spices from Spice Kitchen UK, but the opinions are, as usual, my own.

Visiting the North Indian cuisine from my kitchen

Annoyed about so much discussion and reading about Indian cuisine, but so little experience, I decided to start my own culinary tour of some local dishes. 

The first try was dilly style palak paneer, considered a popular vegetarian dish in North India, common to both Pakistani and Indian cuisine. Paneer is the tender Indian cheese, very sweet and a real pleasure for the palate. The small chunks of cheese are covered in a combination of fresh spinach leaves, butter, onion, tomatoes and a lot of aromatic spices that unfortunatelly I cannot name exactly. It is not considered very hot, but after two seconds you will feel a wave of hot temperature bursting from your mouth. You do not throw out flames; not yet. Most probably my big mistake is that I did not know that I may need some yogurt dressing or a simple boiled rice pr even better, a chunk of Indian bread for diminishing the hotness. 

Without moving from North India, I switched the next day to a different (still vegetarian) dish, also based on paneer - mutter (or mattar, according to some prononciations) paneer. It is less spicey that the palak one. It has: peas, tomatoes and a bunch of spices that I do not know too much about. Some recipes include a local type of potato, but I did not feel something was missing out of my dish. If you would love to taste it in a local restaurant, you may be offered some Indian bread on the side. 

Both dishes can be prepared at home, but I would prefer a basic training in portioning and calculating the right concentration of spices.