April 13, 2010

Living in Vancouver, one learns to love Indian food. Especially being a vegetarian in Vancouver, which I was for about 4 years. However, my attempts at actually making Indian food are few and not exactly complicated. One can easily buy, at any grocer with an "ethnic foods" section, blocks-o-curry that can be tossed in with a stir fry. Not that said blocks-o-curry aren't delicious, but I wanted to try a dish with a bit more complication, something other than curry, something more on the traditional foods spectrum.

When I think Indian, I think Naan. Now I know Naan is traditionally made in a tandoori oven, which obviously I don't have. But I figured it's like pizza - tastes better when cooked that way, but possible to bake otherwise. So I found a lovely Naan recipe from the BBC by Anjum Anand. Anjum hosts BBC's Indian Food Made Easy, and a glance through many other Naan recipes, she is definitely right in her show title. Most other recipes call for strange ingrdients. Nothing in this recipe that one wouldn't stock in an ordinary kitchen.

Recently, I worked in an office with a woman who brought in her Indian mother-in-law's amazing homemade pakoras. I am a huge fan of pakoras, so I decided to see about making those. Unfortunately, I no longer work in that office (the nature of temp work!), and so I had to search about on my own. I'm lucky, and I live several blocks from Vancouver's Punjabi Market, so finding a market that sold the specialized ingredients required in Manjula's Bread Pakoras was not a problem.

And because a curry MUST be part of any Indian dish, I charged Alex, my most-frequent diner, to make a curry his girlfriend had recently raved to me about. Nothing like sharing duties to make me a little less stressed about winging a dish!

First off, I was not 100% satisfied with this Naan recipe. I think in future, I'm going to attempt some of the more complicated recipes. This turned out a bit more like pita than Naan, which I attribute entirely to the fact that the bread never rose to twice its original size. I gave it two attempts, and left each for over an hour to sit. They rose nary an inch. And when looking at the actual recipe, it's hard to see what would make it rise. My bread-chemistry knowledge is low, but something didn't seem right.

Other than that, Alex's curry was delicious! We served it over a bit of saffron-rice. It was spicy and flavourful, and the chunks of yam were perfectly cooked. And the pakoras. Oh the pakoras. I think I will be making these again, though not often, because I think my arteries clogged from just looking at the amount of oil I was using! I'm not a fan of deep-frying, but these were definitely something that made me want to take it up!