A couple of weeks ago, one of the gals at work made some homemade "Pav Bhaji" and brought it for a potluck. As I understand it, it's sort of an Indian comfort food, and they eat it a lot. I've eaten quite a bit of Indian food, but don't recall ever having it before, and I had no idea what I was missing, because it was absolutely incredible. I liked it so much that I asked for her recipe.
In a nutshell, you take some potatoes and a bunch of other vegetables, boil them together and mash them up. While this is going on, you take a lot of butter and some onion, a bunch of spices, and tomatoes, and cook it all up in a stirfry pan. Once the masala sauce is done, you mix it with the mashed vegetables, and serve it up with some sweet bread rolls, and sprinkle it with some lemon juice and fresh chopped onion.
Yesterday, I decided to try making it myself. Here's the vegetables that went in to mine:
6 Yukon Gold potatoes
1 small eggplant
1 Italian squash
1 bag of broccoli and cauliflower
1 bag of peas and carrots
Chop all the vegetables and boil them in water.
Meanwhile, I took half of a stick of butter, and heated it in a skillet, and cooked it down quite a lot (in Indian cuisine they use A LOT of clarified butter, which they turn into something called ghee, but I didn't get that far), then I threw in some shallots and a lot of dehydrated onion. Once that was all brown, I ground up a bunch of coriander seed (this recipe calls for ground coriander, but I could only find a little bag of coriander seed, so I tried grinding it up in my chopper, which sort of just cracked the seeds, but was super fragrant), and threw that in, along with some grated ginger, some yellow curry powder, some chili powder, and some ground red pepper. Then I added a can of tomatoes, and cooked it all down.
Then I drained the vegetables as best I could, mashed them all up, stirred in the masala sauce, and the remaining half stick of butter, and voila!
It didn't turn out near as good as my friends did, nor as flavorful, despite all the spices. But it worked out ok. And it made so much that I'll still be eating off it two weeks from now. Yay me!
In a nutshell, you take some potatoes and a bunch of other vegetables, boil them together and mash them up. While this is going on, you take a lot of butter and some onion, a bunch of spices, and tomatoes, and cook it all up in a stirfry pan. Once the masala sauce is done, you mix it with the mashed vegetables, and serve it up with some sweet bread rolls, and sprinkle it with some lemon juice and fresh chopped onion.
Yesterday, I decided to try making it myself. Here's the vegetables that went in to mine:
6 Yukon Gold potatoes
1 small eggplant
1 Italian squash
1 bag of broccoli and cauliflower
1 bag of peas and carrots
Chop all the vegetables and boil them in water.
Meanwhile, I took half of a stick of butter, and heated it in a skillet, and cooked it down quite a lot (in Indian cuisine they use A LOT of clarified butter, which they turn into something called ghee, but I didn't get that far), then I threw in some shallots and a lot of dehydrated onion. Once that was all brown, I ground up a bunch of coriander seed (this recipe calls for ground coriander, but I could only find a little bag of coriander seed, so I tried grinding it up in my chopper, which sort of just cracked the seeds, but was super fragrant), and threw that in, along with some grated ginger, some yellow curry powder, some chili powder, and some ground red pepper. Then I added a can of tomatoes, and cooked it all down.
Then I drained the vegetables as best I could, mashed them all up, stirred in the masala sauce, and the remaining half stick of butter, and voila!
It didn't turn out near as good as my friends did, nor as flavorful, despite all the spices. But it worked out ok. And it made so much that I'll still be eating off it two weeks from now. Yay me!
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