My mother befriended a young Indian woman she works with and has been adopted as her American surrogate mother. Which means I now have an Indian sister – who cooks for me! And she’s a vegetarian, like me! And so I get authentic Indian food without all the oil and salt you get in a restaurant, and all fresh and homemade. And she’s teaching me how to cook my favorite things.
I will never be held hostage to proximity to an Indian restaurant again!
I have been wanting Indian food for a few days now but I don’t like eating alone and only one person I know likes it too.
I quite like the Indian restaurant here in Plattsburgh. The servings are good size (I usually get three meals from one dish) and the food is good. And, their mango lassi is unbelievable.
I could not live there! I can have Indian food from any of six different restaurants (two excellent, three perfectly nice, one I might have thrown the menu away), within twenty to forty minutes. Or indeed Nepalese food, which if you’ve never tried it is too good to describe. Enough food for two to eat as much as we can now, eat some more later as soon as we have room, then have it for lunch tomorrow too. Good idea - think I’ll have a curry. Now then… Goan or Bangladeshi tonight…?
Learn to cook Indian food. Trust me, it is not difficult at all. All you need is to get the packaged masalas and follow the instructions on them.
An example for chicken tikka masala - get some skinless chicken thighs, cut them up into edible pieces. Get a packet of pre-mixed chicken tikka masala. Mix the recommended quantity, as specified on the pack, with some plain yogurt and a teaspoonful of edible oil. Add juice of a lemon. Marinate the chicken pieces in this paste for about an hour. Get you oven heated to about 400F and put the pieces in to bake for about 30 minute, turning them half-way through. Take out and eat!
We’ve tried. Many times. My wife and I both know our way around a kitchen, and we’ve tried at least a dozen recipes. We have four or five Indian cookbooks in our cupboard, and a pantry full of exotic spices. But it never comes out just…quite…right. Not like we got at our old favorite place. There’s just something missing. My wife is convinced that they’re hiding some secret ingredient from the rest of us.
I feel the same way about Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean food, too. It’s taken me years to finally admit there is some stuff it just isn’t worth cooking at home.
Is it bad form to quote yourself? I just wanted to make it clear that the food would be delivered to my house in twenty to forty minutes. If I wanted to go and fetch it I could walk and have it in ten.
You *can *learn to cook excellent Indian food. You just have to put in exactly what it says in the recipe, including grinding your own freshly toasted spices and not substituting anything. My curries were never as good as I wanted until I bothered to go out and buy ghee, for instance. No kind of oil cuts it unless it’s what the recipe calls for. Next time a recipe doesn’t seem quite right, try to identify what it is that’s wrong about it. Is it not creamy enough? Too oniony? Not enough fenugreek? Curry can be very specific. You should be able to tell what it is that’s not hitting it for you and tweak it next time. Curry can also be very vague, on the other hand. I make a fantastic prawn curry (though I say so myself!) which doesn’t require any measuring and takes about fifteen minutes from getting the prawns from the fridge to serving the dish. If you include stuffing it into naan breads so good I’ve been offered sexual favours for them, maybe an hour and a half (with proving). I don’t feel bad for bragging about the naan bread; it’s not strictly speaking my recipe.