Potatoes and Carrots in Coconut Curry

On my quest to start eating Indian food again, I was very excited to make this recipe for potato carrot curry in a coconut sauce. The recipe was pretty easy. It called for 2 tbsp cumin seeds and 2 tbsp curry powder. That seemed high so I used 1 tbsp of each. I also left out the onion and garlic and used onion/garlic oil instead. Since I’m still trying to avoid spicy foods, I left out the serrano chilies as well.

This was super tasty and very little work to make. Definitely something I’d make again when I don’t feel like making something too complicated.

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Low Fodmap Curried Chickpeas with Fresh Ginger and Cilantro

I’ve been very excited to start eating Indian food again. I got some canned chickpeas and decided to make Chana Masala. I’ve made this recipe from The Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker a number of times, though it’s been a while. But I’ve never made the recipe with canned chickpeas before and it required a bit of experimentation. The original recipe says to cook dry chickpeas in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours before adding the rest of the ingredients and cooking for another hours. I skipped the pre-cooking and just added all the ingredients together and cooked them for an hour. I also had to guess a bit with the water. The recipe calls for 6 cups of water with the dry beans. I added 2 cups to the canned beans, which turned out to be too much. Next time I’d only add 1 cup. Since I haven’t made the recipe in a while, I can’t remember if I followed the ingredients completely before. The cumin seeds called for seemed high to me. Instead of the tablespoon of cumin seeds called for, I used 2 tsp. I definitely think that was enough. The flavor of the final dish was good.

Sprouted Mung Beans with Coconut and Spices

Sprouted mung beans are one of the few forms of legume I can currently consume, but I don’t have much to do with them. I was excited to find a recipe for spiced mung beans in the Indian Vegetarian Cookbook. The recipe does contain lots of spices, but still wasn’t super flavorful. I left out the dried coconut to avoid the fructose, so maybe it would have been more flavorful with the coconut. However, since it is at least a somewhat interesting way to eat low fodmap sprouted beans, I’d make this again, possibly doubling the spices and adding something creamy at the end.

Bharta (Mashed Eggplant with Peanuts and Spices)

I hadn’t made Indian food in a while, since I can’t eat beans or spicy food at the moment. But I’d read that sprouted mung beans were low fodmap and found a recipe for spiced sprouted mung beans in the Indian Vegetarian Cookbook. I wanted to make a vegetable to go with them, so I made this eggplant dish. This is an unusual preparation, as you first steam the eggplant before incorporating it into the rest of the dish. I didn’t like the result. The eggplant tasted watery and didn’t incorporate the flavor of the rest of the dish. I ended up adding some half and half, which improved the taste, but I wouldn’t make this again.

Jackfruit Biryani

I went to Texas to visit family in August and came back with four of my siblings’ cookbooks on loan. After a barely getting five green beans from my garden all summer, I’ve had a miraculous end-of-season glut of green beans this year. So this recipe for jackfruit biryani was the first from the group I decided to try. It’s from East Meets Vegan by Shasha Gill.

I had to do quite a bit of modification since I’m avoiding many types of nuts and all fruit at the moment. I replaced the cashews with 1/2 and 1/2 pine nuts and walnuts. Both were good. I left out the raisins and instead added a tsp of sugar to the cooking onions. That worked out really well and I didn’t really miss the dried fruit. I also used regular yogurt instead of vegan yogurt and swapped out bell pepper for the carrot, since that’s what I had.

The flavor of the dish was good and the jackfruit was a very unique aspect. But the consistency was wrong. The picture from the cookbook shoes a nice fluffy biryani with individuated pieces of rice. But my version came out very wet and mushy. More like a sticky rice compote than a biryani. I’m not sure why this happened, but next time I’d halve the vegetable stock. Also, next time I’d pull the cardamom pods out of the rice before combining it with the curry. Worth trying again with some tweaking I think.

Masoor Dal

I have a very old, well-loved 1981 copy of Madhur Jeffry’s World of the East Vegetarian Cooking. The pages are yellow and a whole chunk of the book has come unbound. Yet, it’s such a standby for me that I’d never think of replacing it. This week I wanted to make masoor dal and turned to Madhur Jeffry. Her very simple recipe for massor dal on page 96 did not disappoint. The recipe only contains 8 ingredients but the result was so interesting and full of flavor I would never have known.

The original version is meant to be made on the stove, but I adapted it to go in my slow cooker. Instead of adding the ginger an tumeric immediately after the lentils started boiling, I let the lentil cook in my slow cooker for an hour before adding them. In total the lentils were in my slow cooker for about 4 hours. Instead of turning off the heat before adding the fried cumin seeds and dried red pepper in asefetida, I left the slow cooker on for another 10 minutes after adding them. I’ll be making this again.

1 cup massor dal

1 quarter-sized slice of fresh ginger

1 tsp salt

2 tbsp vegetable oil

pinch of asafetida

1 tsp cumin seeds

2 whole, hot dried peppers

Zucchini Kofta

I’m pretty tired of zucchini. It’s the end of summer and I’ve been eating them all season. But my garden isn’t quite done yet so I’m looking for something interesting to do with them. I love malai kofta, so when I saw a recipe for Zucchini Kofta on page 148 of Indian Vegetarian Cooking at Your House I was intrigued. But I’ve never found a recipe in this cookbook that really worked, so I commenced with caution.

In the end the results were mixed. The results were delicious but the ratio of kofta to sauce was very off. I ended up only making half of the kofta and still didn’t have enough sauce for them. I’m going to try making this again, but will really mess with the sauce recipe. I’d also like to try baking the kofta instead of frying them.