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Aug. 30th, 2009 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katallisonI've been feeling a bit under the weather this weekend--achey and blah--which is a shame, because today has been a specimen of late-summer perfection, mellow, golden, sun-drenched, ripe, ample, relaxed and supple. I did go out for a while this afternoon, and drove around soaking up sun, did some grocery shopping, and came home to fix This Week In Food. (My current pattern is to cook a whole bunch of food on Sunday, stick it in the fridge, and then parcel it out for lunches and dinners throughout the week, on account of how trying to cook too often in my current tiny cramped kitchen tips me over the edge into ARRGGGHHH/SMASH.)
I decided this was going to be Curry Week, and so put together a big pot of my standard chicken curry, which is a rather soupy, rather sweetish, heavy-on-the-garam-masala affair, and a pot of brown rice, and then on impulse tweaked around my standard roast cauliflower recipe, which resulted in -- something that pleased me a great deal.
Amazingly Simple Roasted Sort-of-Indian Sort-of-Curried Vegetables
One head cauliflower
Two or three carrots
Can of chickpeas
Curry powder (I am lazy and do not assemble my own, and if you are lazy like me, I commend the various Penzey's blends to your attention)
To bolster the standard curry powder, additional turmeric, cumin, cayenne, smoked paprika (that last not traditionally Indian but yummy). Ground-up mustard seed would be good too, though I didn't have any on hand.
Olive oil
Preheat oven to 400.
Cut up cauliflower into florets; peel and chunk up the carrots. Drain chickpeas. Put all of these into a bowl. Mix up about a quarter-cup of olive oil with the spices (I didn't measure them, but I would say don't be timid with quantities). Pour the oil/spice mixture over the vegies, stir everything up well, and then spread the melange out on a baking sheet. (Put down a piece of foil first, or the turmeric will stain your baking sheet in a lasting way. *voice of experience*)
Bung it in the oven, and let it roast until the vegetables are tender and beginning to blacken a bit at the edges (maybe 20-30 min). Pull out, let cool. Eat most of what was intended to be a week's worth of lunch fodder at one go. HEAVENLY.
One could use other vegetables, of course -- potatoes, perhaps, and onions, chunked up. Peas would be too small and would burn prematurely. Peppers and tomatoes would make it a very different dish, too sweet I think -- the point, to me, is the contrast between the savory earthiness of the roasted cauliflower, and the caramelized sweetness of the roasted carrots, and the overall dusty-hot-savory-verging-on-bitter cast of the spicing. Eggplant, maybe? Maybe.
(And -- hmm, maybe just a tiny spash of vinegar would be good, added in with the oil and the spices. To try next time, maybe.)
I decided this was going to be Curry Week, and so put together a big pot of my standard chicken curry, which is a rather soupy, rather sweetish, heavy-on-the-garam-masala affair, and a pot of brown rice, and then on impulse tweaked around my standard roast cauliflower recipe, which resulted in -- something that pleased me a great deal.
Amazingly Simple Roasted Sort-of-Indian Sort-of-Curried Vegetables
One head cauliflower
Two or three carrots
Can of chickpeas
Curry powder (I am lazy and do not assemble my own, and if you are lazy like me, I commend the various Penzey's blends to your attention)
To bolster the standard curry powder, additional turmeric, cumin, cayenne, smoked paprika (that last not traditionally Indian but yummy). Ground-up mustard seed would be good too, though I didn't have any on hand.
Olive oil
Preheat oven to 400.
Cut up cauliflower into florets; peel and chunk up the carrots. Drain chickpeas. Put all of these into a bowl. Mix up about a quarter-cup of olive oil with the spices (I didn't measure them, but I would say don't be timid with quantities). Pour the oil/spice mixture over the vegies, stir everything up well, and then spread the melange out on a baking sheet. (Put down a piece of foil first, or the turmeric will stain your baking sheet in a lasting way. *voice of experience*)
Bung it in the oven, and let it roast until the vegetables are tender and beginning to blacken a bit at the edges (maybe 20-30 min). Pull out, let cool. Eat most of what was intended to be a week's worth of lunch fodder at one go. HEAVENLY.
One could use other vegetables, of course -- potatoes, perhaps, and onions, chunked up. Peas would be too small and would burn prematurely. Peppers and tomatoes would make it a very different dish, too sweet I think -- the point, to me, is the contrast between the savory earthiness of the roasted cauliflower, and the caramelized sweetness of the roasted carrots, and the overall dusty-hot-savory-verging-on-bitter cast of the spicing. Eggplant, maybe? Maybe.
(And -- hmm, maybe just a tiny spash of vinegar would be good, added in with the oil and the spices. To try next time, maybe.)