You may have noticed that, unlike many intercultural blogs, I don't post any recipes of new Indian dishes I've learned to cook. Partially that's because, well, I don't cook much Indian food, really. And partially because I figure that all of you are intelligent to google your way to the thousands (or, at least, dozens) of cooking blogs that feature great recipes of traditional Indian dishes. There's a few blogs I particularly like listed in the sidebar under Odds & Ends, if you haven't seen this blogging niche before. However, at least in the food blogs I follow, I've seen an untapped segment in the market - there aren't any recipes of Indianfied traditional American dishes! This sort of fusion food, along with stir frys, is the majority of what I cook - just simple dishes that you ate growing up mixed with an Indian sense of spices. They're the best of both worlds: quick, easy recipes that I know like the back of my hand adjusted so that Aditya won't complain about "blandness" when we eat. So, today I'll share with you my recipe for Quick Indianfied Chicken Pot Pie. This is the dish that got amazed raves from Aditya's parents when I served it to them. (I think that prior to my cooking it, they hadn't realized I knew how to cook at all, so perhaps they were just glad I hadn't accidentally poisoned them.) It's a very simple, quick, filling dish, so even if you're not much of a cook, you should be able to manage just fine. Besides the text below, I've loaded a bunch of images on my flickr site to show you how to do it step-by-step too.
Continue reading...Sunday, March 30, 2008
A reader, Veronica, sent in the following question a couple of days ago: My boyfriend is from Gondia and I wanted to learn to cook some food from that area of India. What kind of Indian food do you cook for your husband? Heh, well, I guess it's confession time here on Gori Girl: I can't remember the last time I cooked real Indian food. Maggi? Sure. Ginger tea? It's been known to happen. TastyBite or other yummy precooked packaged Indian meals? We've got a pantry full of 'em. And we've got a kabob takeout place on speed dial. But I don't ever cook a full meal of real Indian food. I mean, I have in the past, but it's not a regular thing at all. There's a simple enough explanation for this - I've just never learned how to cook Indian food. When I grew up in California I had a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese friends and neighbors, so I can make a fair number of Chinese dishes. I've managed to pick up a few things from my Mexican, Japanese, and Korean relatives (yup, it's a rainbow of colors at family reunions). But until I met Aditya I wasn't close friends with anyone who could cook Indian food. Of course, given his limited repertoire in the kitchen, I still didn't know anyone who could cook (much) Indian food after I met him either. Nowadays, I mostly limit myself to adding Indian spices to change the taste of some of the dishes I already cook. Turmeric powder gets tossed into the stirfry, or garam masala is added to the sausage stew after it's done. Actually, it's a bit of a hazard for our friends who dine at our house without knowing this habit of mine - they'll bite into the chicken pot pie, only to discover there's a bunch of chicken curry masala in the sauce. While this response might be a superficial answer to Veronica's question (no Indian food is cooked for poor Aditya), it isn't a particularly helpful answer for people looking to make some familiar food for their partners. This question actually comes at a particularly good time, as I've been thinking about trying my hand at real Indian cooking. So - how can you learn to cook Indian (or other, new-to-you) food? Let's go through the difference resources available:
Continue reading...
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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