Indian Dinner

So, as a continuation from the last post, I will explain the other Indian dishes that my sister and I made from our Indian cookbook. This first one is a potato dish called "Tamatar Aloo", which contains potatoes sauteed with a mixture of Indian spices, lemon juice, tomatoes, and cilantro. We found that the outcome looked nothing like the picture in the cookbook, and that perhaps there were too many spices and too much lemon juice for such a small amount of potatoes. The result was that you could taste mostly lemon juice, cilantro, and paprika, but little else. I think that, if we make this again, we will use less spices so as to have a dish that is more fragrant than overpowering.


For our main dish, we made "Chicken Vindaloo", which my sister and I agreed was much more successful than the potato dish. It was deliciously tender chicken simmered in a paste of Vindaloo Masala, onions, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and cayenne, and finished with some lemon juice. The flaw of the book is it doesn't give a recipe to making a Vindaloo Masala, which is basically a spice mix, so you would have to either seek a recipe on your own, or buy a paste of it in the store as I had to do. I searched around for recipes, but they varied so much that I decided to buy one of the VH sauces for Vindaloo Masala. The recipe only calls for two tablespoons of it, so I figured using the paste wouldn't be an issue, but while it resulted in an incredibly flavourful curry, it probably didn't count as an authentic Vindaloo, because it really wasn't that spicy at all.

I also made a "Mango Chutney" from this book, which I think was a very good starter recipe, but it was overly sour due to the two and a half cups of vinegar used to just two pounds of mangoes. I would instead, since I'm not canning the chutney, use less vinegar in order to obtain a much more balanced and well-rounded chutney.


And here is a picture of the entire meal!!