Going Green

Wine:

Little James’ Basket Press Gigondas

We continue on our exploration of recipes from Indian Home Cooking by Suvir Saran and Stephanie Lyness. It is a very good cookbook. We really are enjoying the dishes. We hope to eat at Saran’s restaurant in New York City: Devi.

We made two new dishes. The first dish was Ground Turkey with Spinach and Whole Spices (Turkey-paalak ka keema). It is amazing we had never cooked with ground turkey before. I was surprised at our local market they actually sell two varieties of ground turkey: Ground Dark Meat, Ground White Meat. We of course, bought one of each! The dish has lots of spices, yogurt, spinach and dried fenugreek leaves (thank god for our local Indian Market). The fenugreek and spinach gives the dish a green color. It is very good, not hard to make and easily reheats.

For the second dish, we made Cardamon-Roasted Cauliflower adapted from American Masala: 125 New Classics From My Home Kitchen by Raquel Pelzel.
The cauliflower flowerets are roasted with lots of spices and onions. It is a very tasty dish! We had purchased a new mortar and pestle from American Masala. It is specially crafted to grind spices. It has a very wide Pestle that keeps the spices from popping out of the mortar. This was our first time to use it. It works!

We made rice to go with the dishes.

We really like the idea of learning how to cook a whole new cuisine.

We will make both of these dishes again.

For dessert we had Banana Cream Pie from Clementine. The bananas are appropriate for an Indian Dinner and the Cream was soothing after the spice of the Indian Cooking.



Cardamom-Roasted Cauliflower
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Adapted from American Masala: 125 New Classics From My Home Kitchen by Suvir Saran with Raquel Pelzel (Clarkson Potter/Publishers, October 2007)
Serves 8
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra for greasing baking dish
3 cardamom pods
3 dried red chiles (optional)
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole peppercorns
1 head of cauliflower (2 1/2 to 3 pounds), cored and broken into medium florets
1 medium red onion, halved and thinly sliced
Kosher salt for sprinkling
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Grease a 9x13-inch baking dish or large gratin dish with olive oil and set aside.
Using mortar and pestle, grind the cardamom pods, chiles, coriander, cumin and peppercorns until fine. Transfer the spices to a large bowl and mix with the olive oil. Add the cauliflower and onions and toss to coat. Transfer the vegetables to a baking dish and roast until they’re tender, about 1 hour, stirring every 20 minutes. Sprinkle with salt and serve.