Friday, March 27, 2009

I Cooked Indian Food!

I'm a lady who loves food. I love eating. And I love going out to restaurants. However with the economy being the way it is I'm tightening my belt - both figuratively and literally. A crappy economy won't stop me from enjoying good eats. Luckily for me, I don't mind cooking and sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet about a particular something.

For example, I've been craving Indian food for a few weeks. And it didn't help or hurt that I stumbled up a Yellow Dal recipe. Then I found a super deelish sounding chicken recipe that would go perfectly with the Dal. And then I determined that I need to make Saag Paneer again. From there people were invited to the house and a dinner party was born.

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I had cooked Indian food before. When Paul and I first moved to Toronto. We didn't know anyone and I wasn't working so it was the perfect thing to do. I made Butter Chicken and Saag Paneer and it took all day. Get details and photos here. To sum up: my Butter Chicken rocked but my Saag Paneer was totally tasteless.

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Once again, I made my own paneer. It's an incredibly easy thing to do. You just have to follow the steps just right.

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Here I am cooking the onions, garlic and spices before I add them to the lentil/tomato puree.

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Here's the spinach before we chopped it up and added the paneer. Still not the best saag paneer but much better than my first try.

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The chicken was outstanding! In fact it was the "best" of all the dishes.

All-in-all dinner wasn't half bad. I definitely will make both the chicken and the dal again. And I really want to get the paneer recipe right. I kinda wish I had gotten better photos of the finished food but we were too hungry to wait. Maybe next time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That all looks so awesome! I'll be right over for dinner next time I'm inSF. even if the Saag Paneer is tastelss I'll still eat it ;)

sacwho said...

Meredith and I love cooking Indian food. I've done several Kormas and Chicken Marsala. Yours looks terrific!