My sister, Danielle and I have been cooking and baking machines lately. There have been many delicious meals so far, but the one I will be posting about is our curry night. Lots of new things were accomplished. I decided to try Paratha which is an Indian whole wheat flat bread. It's like naan, but naan's usually involve fillings or other flavorings and also yeast to help rise. I found this to be a really simple bread to make. In a mixing bowl, I mixed a cup of whole wheat flour, a pinch of salt, and a half cup of tap water. I mixed it around with my hands until it started to form a soft ball of dough. I then put the dough back in the mixing bowl with a damp towel right on top of it for 15 minutes and let it rise.
After the rising was done, (it doesn't really rise that much, just enough to become a bit more solid and able to work with), I started to knead the dough on a lightly oiled surface. I was just using canola oil. For this next part, I watched a video to see exactly how it should be done, but I kind of changed it. I divided the dough into five separate parts and rolled the parts with the palm of my hand. Then, I rolled each ball into about a 3 inch diameter circle, put a tiny drop of oil on the circle, folded it in half, put on some more oil and folded it in half again so it was a tiny triangle. I did the same with all the other dough balls. You are then supposed the roll the triangle into a 6 inch circle. But I found that the triangles still rather oily and difficult to roll out. So I kept coating them in flour so they wouldn't stick to the counter and rolled them into balls again and then into a large circle. Now, you are supposed to cook these on an iron skillet...however we don't have one so I just used a simple frying pan. So I heated up the pan to about low-medium and put in a couple of teaspoons of oil. I coated each piece of dough in flour again and cooked one at a time. They took about a few minutes on each side. I knew to flip it once I saw it was forming bubbles and little brown spots.
Danielle and I collaborated on the curry, while she worked on the 'aromatic rice'. The rice was a cup of basmati rice with different spices, mixed in (cardamom mostly). We then started on our veggie curry. I came up with a spice blend to start warming up in oil. I came up with curry, tumeric, garam masala, cumin and red chili. Danielle and I started to chop some veggies and work with what we had in the fridge. I chopped up an onion and minced a couple cloves of garlic. Danielle chopped up some carrots, cauliflower and string beans. We decided that it needed some more spice, so I added a bit more of each spice, especially curry so it would get that awesome yellow color. It gave so much more flavor after tasting. We added the rest of the veggies and let them be coated in the spices and added about a half cup of almond milk and then about a half cup of rice milk. The almond milk was making it sort of sweet. We then put a cover on it to make the veggies cook a bit faster. Then once they were nice and tender and the curry broth was tasting and looking like curry, we added the cooked potatoes.
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