![\"Ingredients](\"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/20220717_155238.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI will point out that this is also the recipe for this meal with the second\u00a0shortest<\/em> ingredient list.\u00a0 Everything in this picture is chopped and \/ or measured as appropriate, and mixed together with some water to make a dough.<\/p>\n These breads are then shaped into small rounds with a hole in the middle that can be either pan- or deep-fried.\u00a0 We hate deep frying, so back out with the cast iron it was!<\/p>\n We didn’t manage to produce the most symmetrical little buggers, but close enough.<\/p>\n Moving on, our side dish is from the region of Goa.\u00a0 Goa was the site of a Portuguese colony from 1510 until 1961, over a decade after the remainder of India gained independence from the United Kingdom.\u00a0 The cuisine is a fascinating mix of Indian and European influences, and is the home of one of my favorite curry types, the vindaloo. (Literally, “meat in garlic”, but best known for being a very vinegar forward curry.)<\/p>\n But today we’re making Beans Foogath, a relatively straightforward dish of green beans and coconut. The beans are cooked with some dried and fresh chiles, onion, and a comparatively small number of spices.<\/p>\n Once everything is a nice bright green, you toss in some grated coconut and water, and stew it until the beans are done but still crunchy.\u00a0 And that’s it!<\/p>\n Next up, lentils!\u00a0 In this case, split pigeon peas, or toor dal, cooked in a style hopefully representative of the state of Gujarat.\u00a0 The ingredient list on this one is QUITE long.\u00a0 First, you cook the beans separately to soften them up a bit.\u00a0 Once they’re close to cooked, you add in ginger, chiles, jaggery (cane sugar), peanuts, kokum, and potatoes, boiled.<\/p>\n Wait – what?\u00a0 Potatoes,\u00a0boiled?<\/em><\/p>\n Attention recipe authors – please do not bury a process that takes 20-30 minutes in the ingredient list.\u00a0 Not wanting to delay dinner by another half hour when we already had chicken cooking and bread getting cold, we left out the potatoes.<\/p>\n Please enjoy this picture of kokum, instead.<\/p>\n Kokum is a type of dried plum used as a souring agent in a lot of Indian food.\u00a0 My understanding, which could be wrong, is that one way to determine how far north you are in India is to check the relative prevalence of kokum vs. tamarind.<\/p>\n At any rate, with the lentils cooking, it’s time to make the tempering – the flavored oil with other spices that is used to season the dish. And here’s the family photo for this step:<\/p>\n More or less clockwise from bottom, we have tomatoes, fenugreek leaf, cumin seed, mustard seed, cloves, dried chiles, fenugreek seed, bay leaves, cinnamon, coriander seed, and tumeric.\u00a0 These all get fried off together with some curry leaves.<\/p>\n Once everything is nice and fragrant, the tempered oil and the spices go in with the beans, and that means there’s only one dish left to talk about.<\/p>\n For our main dish, we return to Maharashtra, and specifically the city of Nagpur.\u00a0 We’re making a dish called\u00a0Saoji Chicken.\u00a0<\/em>Every recipe you find for this dish specifically brings up how spicy it is.\u00a0 Spicy is fine, but the\u00a0repeated<\/em> warnings were a little interesting.<\/p>\n First up, we make a spice paste, or\u00a0masala<\/em>, from another huge stack of ingredients:<\/p>\n From left to right (more or less), this is sorghum flour, whole mace flowers, kashmiri chiles, black cardamom, black pepper, green cardamom, cloves, star anise, bay leaves, coriander seed, oil cinnamon, onion, ginger, and garlic. Not pictured, but still included, grated coconut and cilantro.\u00a0 Not pictured and NOT included, poppy seeds and stone flower.<\/p>\n Poppy seeds were left out because we thought we had some, but didn’t.\u00a0 Stone flower is an interesting one, though.\u00a0 It’s apparently a lichen used to add flavor to some curries, but we managed to stump the clerk at the Indian grocery store when we asked for it, even when presented with a number of possible different translations.\u00a0 Apparently it CAN be found if we wanted to drive down to the suburbs and poke about, but it’s hard to imagine the dish completely changing character because we left out one ingredient out of all these.<\/p>\n In order to simplify cooking, we mised<\/em> some\u00a0en place<\/em> to get ready:<\/p>\n These various bits were fried off in sequence.<\/p>\n Once everything was cooked, it all went into the spice grinder to make a paste, and the aromatics were fried separately.\u00a0 Finally, the spice paste and the aromatics went into the food processor to make a pastier paste.\u00a0 Which then had to be fried\u00a0even more.<\/em><\/p>\n We of course tasted it at this point, and the flavor was indeed pretty intense, although I’m not sure I’d say SPICY was the dominant note.\u00a0 Just really, really complex.\u00a0 At this point, the chicken was added, tossed with the masala and a little water, and cooked until done.<\/p>\n Two confessions: I forgot to take any pictures of the chicken actually cooking.\u00a0 You’ll have to wait for the final meal picture.<\/p>\n Second confession: I bought boneless chicken thighs.\u00a0 I KNOW the bones add flavor, but sometimes I just don’t have the spoons to deal with them.\u00a0 Or the knives, to be more accurate.\u00a0 At any rate, after 25 minutes or so, the chicken was done, and it was time to bring everything to the table.<\/p>\n And here we are!\u00a0Dhapate, Foogath Beans,\u00a0<\/em>Gujarati style dal, and Saoji chicken, along with some basmati rice and a Kingfisher, which according to the bottle is “India’s Premium Beer”.\u00a0 Also according to the label, this one was brewed in the UK.\u00a0 Oops.<\/p>\n At any rate, how was it? Excellent!\u00a0 The bread was a BIT chewy from being made several hours in advance and cooling, but it had a nice spice mixture, and it was perfect for soaking up the sauces.\u00a0 The green beans had plenty of personality from the simmering with the spices and the coconut.\u00a0 The dal was interesting – the peanuts gave it a bit of a crunch, but based on the descriptions I have read of the flavor, I suspect it needed a bit more sugar.\u00a0 And the chicken was delicious.<\/em> All that complexity really shone through in the masala.\u00a0 My only complaint is that the amount of masala generated by the recipe could easily have seasoned twice the volume of chicken, and then we’d have had leftovers.<\/p>\n So with two down and two to go, our hurtle around India is a great success so far! Next up, the south!<\/p>\n Recipes: This week, we head to Western India, and the area that was at one time the Mughal Empire.\u00a0 The pattern from last time of “bread – side dish – lentil\u00a0 – main” seemed to work pretty well, so we decided … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nGoan Style French Beans Foogath<\/a>
\nDhapate<\/a>
\nGujarati Dal<\/a>
\nSaoji Chicken<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"