Okay! First official food-related post. This one is about forays into Indian cooking. This is one of those deals where we were trying to match a meal with a wine. We had a bottle of Riesling that we wanted to try and planned the meal around that.
Thankfully there's all sorts of ways to plan meals and wines. Whites with light meals, reds with heavy, reds with red meat, whites with white, etc. You can base things on flavors that compliment one another once you are more experienced with wining and dining. Or you can check out the applet on Wine Answers
We of course, chose the latter, and it was decided that I'd make an attempt at Indian style cooking.
First I started by making naan, a type of flat-bread. It starts out like normal bread, make the dough, let it rise, punch the dough, etc. Seeing how we both love garlic I made sure to put plenty of it in the dough. Then came the fun part, cooking the naan in a skillet. I've never made naan before so I was clumsy with the first couple pieces. For one thing I didn't flatten the dough enough and for another I turned the burner up too high and ended up setting off the smoke alarm :O I did get the hang of it afterwards though, and it came out rather well.
After I had finished the naan I started on this tomato-chicken recipe I found online. All Recipes is a great site, practically anything you could want is there. Of course there are other great recipe sites as well, this one's just a one-stop-shop in my book. The chicken recipe itself was rather easy, and the ingredients weren't too hard to find. Living in a small town sometimes makes things difficult.
The sauce for the recipe reminded me of the jars of past you can find in a grocery store, only without all the grease. The puree of onion, garlic, and ginger makes a nice base where you add loads of spices; cumin, tumeric, ground clove, cinnamon etc. It wasn't very hot spice-wise, but it was very aromatic. After adding spices and the chicken you add the tomato, and let it simmer for a couple hours.
I really did not think dinner would take so long, but it's an adventure unto itself. After waiting about an hour I started on some curried potatoes as a side dish. That wasn't as intensive as the chicken. Basically boil potatoes, cut them up, throw them in a pan with spices and let them get slightly toasted. I think I over-boiled the potatoes a bit so they were a little mushy, but still good.
After waiting for hours this is how it came out. It was delicious to say the least. I think I did a good job for my first try at real Indian cooking. More intensive than just following a recipe from a curry paste jar, but a whole lot better as well. It also went really well with the riesling we had with it. St Urbans-hof 2006 German riesling. Wow, that stuff was just a pineapple explosion. I never thought I could taste so much pineapple from a non-pineapple source. I liked it though, and for my first time trying a riesling it wasn't that bad. I'll be sure to try more in the future.
