Dum Aloo- Saturday Special

Over the weekend, we had guests at home. So of course, in anticipation of this, my dormant cooking cells decided to get enthusiastic about cooking. My mother made a safe bet with mutter paneer, so I opted to get a little experimental and make a recipe that I have been reading about often- Dum Aloo Punjabi. There are so many variations of this dish, so I went through a million recipes before I hybridized the following one and then anyway veered away from what I decided. I had help too from an expert cook who was one of the guests, so she tasted my in progress dish and gave me some ideas about what I should do to make it taste better. So finally, I was happy to make a tasty dish out of it. It tasted better with dosas according to most of us than with rotis for some reason.

Start with the masala powder. Powder together 2 tbsp of coriander seeds, 1 tsp of jeera, one clove, a little cardamom and cinammon until it is a fine powder.

Soak and slightly cook about 10 cashew nuts in hot water. Grind to a fine paste. Chop up two onions finely. Puree 3 tomatoes which have been boiled in hot water and peeled. Cook the potatoes in a pressure cooker for about 2 whistles of the cooker or until boiled firmly. Then saute potatoes in oil until light brown all over the surface.

In a flat bottomed pan, add about 3 tbsp of oil and saute bay leaf+onion+ginger garlic paste, until  the onion turns completely brown. Add tomatoes and saute until the soften. Add cashew paste, above ground masala powder. Add turmeric and chilly powder depending on how spicy you want it. Also add salt and a pinch of kitchen king masala if you have some. Add two spoons of curd (Some dum aloo recipes are based completely on curd and have no tomatoes at all. But I didn't like the idea so much considering I don't like curd so much. But this curd was added as a fix to make the dish a little sour and bring balance to the additional spice it needed. and some water to combine. Allow it to boil until the raw smell goes away and the masala combines well. Add potatoes to the mixture and allow to soak on low flame for sometime. Take it off the heat and serve hot.

In other food related news, I finished reading the book, As Always Julia. It's a tome of a book, that I happily bought for a buck in the discount shelves outside the Strand Book Store in New York. It is a compilation of letters between Avis De Voto and Julia Child. It feels like when you are reading this book, that you are going through the whole experience of publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking with them. It's a great book also to understand the then political and social environment albeit from a Democratic point of view. Also both of them were excellent at French and tended to lapse into it in the written form quite often. So it was good practice to read and understand French as well.