Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 9, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Until last week I never met a mulligatawny soup I liked. It wasn’t that I hated the ones I was introduced to; it was more that they were watery, wan, and forgettable. Usually they were included as part of some deal at an Indian restaurant. I was torn between feeling sorry for mulligatawny, clinging to its place on the menu for people scared to order anything else, and vaguely disdaining it as an Anglo imposition on the Indian table.
Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe intrigued me, though, because it is made with meat and thickened with chickpea flour. Mulligatawny takes so many different forms that it seems almost silly to group all these soups under one name, but most of them do seem to be chicken based and have nothing to do with chickpea flour. I had to try this version, and I’m very glad I did.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, April 2, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Although I love dried legumes and pulses more than most non-vegetarians, and although I love the vegetables and meat dishes in An Invitation to Indian Cooking, I tend to avoid the chapter on dals. I think this is because the first dal recipe I ever tried was Jaffrey’s moong dal. “This is North India’s most popular dal,” she writes, “and it is eaten with equal relish by toothless toddlers, husky farmers, and effete urban snobs.” That sounds delightful, right? But it calls for a full tablespoon of turmeric, which was definitely not to my taste. I wonder if my American turmeric is not so great or if it’s my American palate. What do you think?
Recently I had much better luck with her chana dal cooked with lamb. . Chana dal is a hulled and split dal whose grains are a little larger than split peas; it is a member of the chick pea family. In this recipe, it is cooked with so much lamb that it seemed more like lamb stew than a dal to me, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 26, 2008 at 1:30 PM
One of the first Madhur Jaffrey meat recipes I ever tried was a goat stew. Although she recommends that Americans replace the goat with lamb, I’m open to new meats, and someone at the Greenmarket was actually selling goat for stew, so I thought, why not?
Well, my adventuresomeness was not rewarded. I don’t know if it was the recipe (which included at least 8 tablespoons of oil) or the goat (which gave off a lot of fat), but the stew tasted mostly of grease and gristle.
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Posted by Robin Bellinger, March 19, 2008 at 2:45 PM
I didn’t discover Indian food until I was 21 and living in New York City for the first time, and I didn’t try cooking it until my husband and I started dating a few years later. His family, he explained, loved this cookbook author called Madhur Jaffrey—had I heard of her? As it happened, I was working for Knopf, her publisher, but had never taken home a copy of her 1973 classic An Invitation to Indian Cooking. Indian cooking seemed forbiddingly complicated, and besides, the current edition of the book was just a little paperback whose cover featured a campy picture of Jaffrey dressed in a sari, smiling benignly over a still life of ingredients despite the fact that we readers seem to have surprised her in the act of chopping cilantro.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, January 21, 2008 at 4:00 PM
We were having vegetables. That was a fact. The fiancée and I had spent the weekend eating crispy, fat covered carnitas which we then stuffed into homemade corn tortillas. More succulent than pulled pork, and probably three times less healthy, they kept us happy and warm on one of the coldest days Ohio has seen all winter. That was until we woke up this morning and needed something green to get our bodies back in balance. An all veggie recovery meal was in order. I immediately pulled out my spanking new Jamie Oliver’s Cook with Jamie
, knowing that he’d have something good to show us. Isn’t his new show fantastic? I’d never seen so many vegetables on a plate before!
It wasn’t long until we were debating between having Steamed Broccoli with Soy and Ginger or the titled dish. I guess you can tell which one I chose, and it was all those spices mixed with yogurt that really got my mind racing. It reminded me of the Donna Hay’s Baked Chicken with Yogurt and Chili Paste, a previous Dinner Tonight entry, and one that I really enjoyed. Before I knew was happening, I was off to get a chicken to round out this proto-Indian meal with lots of yogurt and so much spice. It wasn’t until halfway through that I remembered the original veggie pledge, but, I thought, it is still very cold. There is always tomorrow to try again.
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