Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Indian-esque

I love Indian food, and that's only because I forced myself to try it again after initially not liking it. I can't exactly remember the first time I had Indian- it must have been in high school or early college- but I know that I had something I didn't like, and my brain created a link that was basically "Indian food=disgusting".

Then my senior year in college, I became friends with an Indian guy in one of my sociology classes and he invited me to go out for Indian food with him. Not wanting to insult him or, oh, a billion of his compatriots, I decided to try it again. The fact that it was a buffet encouraged me, because that way I could a) see and smell the food before putting it on my plate and b) discreetly shovel food in my napkin if I didn't like it and go back to the buffet for something different, like plain white rice.

Lo and behold, I loved everything at the buffet. (everything vegetarian, of course). Since that fateful trip to the Indian buffet in Boston, I have loved Indian food.
***note: I know that at this point, Indian foodies/experts/actual Indian people are rolling their eyes and thinking that "Indian food" is too wide a term, that I don't have any idea about the regional differences that exist in Indian cuisine, and that if all I have ever eaten is faux Indian food, then I am woefully ignorant. I agree with all of the above. I would love to learn more about Indian cuisine, and am open to anyone sponsoring a trip to India for me to master the art of Indian cooking and report back on my blog.

After Boston I moved to Paris, where there was no shortage of authentic Indian restaurants. There was one walking distance from my apartment, with reasonable prices and a nice vegetarian selection:
http://www.eat-out.net/restaurant-paris/wy35208-new-sanna
But since moving to Fernandina Beach, Florida, I have been deprived of nearby Indian restaurants. There are definitely some in Jacksonville, but somehow in 5 years of living here I have not made it to one. So the closest I have come to eating Indian has been Amy's frozen Indian meals, which are good, but expensive:


I have a couple of Indian cookbooks, but the recipes usually involve no fewer than 20 spices, a mortar and pestle, and clarifying butter. Being a single mom with what feels like 10 different jobs, I have no time for such preparations. So I started experimenting with the variety of jarred Indian sauces you can buy at nice supermarkets or health food stores. Basically you prepare whatever vegetables and proteins appeal to you, mix the sauce in, make some rice, and voila, a quasi-Indian-esque stand-in for real Indian food. The vegetables I used this time around were:
onion, garlic, carrots, spinach, potatoes, and chick peas.
I chopped the onion and garlic and put that in the frying pan with some oil to get started, and then added the carrots. I used fresh spinach for this one, but you could use frozen. Cooking fresh spinach is really easy; in this case, I already had the onion, garlic, and carrots in the pan, and then I added a small amount of water (less than 1/4 cup), heaped the fresh spinach on top, and perched the lid on top of that. After a couple of minutes the spinach starts cooking down and you can move it around so more raw spinach goes to the bottom of the pan. After another minute or so the spinach is cooked. At that point I added the sauce- in this case, Karala Curry Vegetable Kurma Sauce-and let it all simmer together for a minute. I had made basmati rice on the side (boil in bag- no measuring- no burning!) and put the whole thing together.

Now, I love Indian, but I don't love spicy. Call me a wimp, but I don't like having my mouth on fire and my nose running at the dinner table. This sauce was too spicy for me, so to thin the flavor out I added a can of chick peas and a can of diced potatoes. That made it much less spicy while still being flavorful.
So the next time you want a satisfying curry but are short on time and/or the only spice in your pantry is oregano that expired in 1988, try making an Indian-inspired meal at home with store-bought sauce. You won't feel as if you've been transported to India, but you might feel as if you were at the Epcot Center version of it.

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