cooking – Climb to the Stars

Nisha's Fried Kingfish and Red Fish Curry [en]

[fr] Poisson grillé et curry rouge de poisson. (J'avais d'abord écrit: "curry de poisson rouge", cherchez l'erreur.)

Here’s a dish Nisha made almost a week ago, but I’ve fallen behind in publishing recipes I took notes about. Here we go!

Start with the fried king mackerel (kingfish) as it has to marinate:

wash the fish
put the fish on a plate, sprinkle with lemon, salt, turmeric, chilli powder and a good spoonful of garlic and ginger paste: mix it all up and leave to sit (half an hour? an hour? more? something like that)

mix rawa and rice flour, and dip the marinated fish in that mixture before frying at a low temperature on a tawa (it really takes quite a while, a good 5 minutes per side, so depending how much fish you have and what size your pan is…)

Now for the red fish curry (you do this in parallel, actually, you want both dishes to be ready as they’re eaten together)

grate the coconut (not sure how to do it without the special coconut graters they have around here — by the way, Nisha says that for chicken and lamb curry, which is a different recipe, you can use dried coconut, but fresh coconut is mandatory for fish curry)
soak lots of red chillies (about ten) with two spoonfuls of coriander seeds in some water
add garlic and make a paste in the mixer
add half the coconut (or more, depending on how much paste you’re making) and blend — add some water to help liquidize, you need make a very smooth paste
heat oil, put crushed garlic and curry leaves in, then add paste, salt, 1 small spoon of tamarind paste (or dried tamarind) and cook about 5 minutes (the paste needs to boil)
add in a few pieces of fish (like the less nice bits of king fish after keeping the nicer parts for frying)
boil another 5 minutes or so.

To eat, pick up a piece of fried fish with some chapati, and dip it in the fish curry. Yum again!

Nisha’s Famous Sweet Sheera [en]

[fr] Une autre recette de Nisha à base de rawa, sucrée cette fois.

Here’s another rawa dish of Nisha’s — a sweet one (see upma for the salty one). I really think I need to get myself a karahi, because pans with flat bottoms just don’t seem to cut it when it comes to making spices and stuff swim in oil or ghee. I’m just wondering if a karahi is compatible with an electric stove like the ones we have in Switzerland. Anybody know?

heat quite a lot of ghee
add half a cup of rawa and mix them together — the rawa absorbs all the ghee
mix in half a small banana cut into little pieces, and mash everything up
add in cashew nuts (broken up), raisins, and pine nuts (I think they’re pine nuts)
heat half a cup of water and half a cup of milk separately, then add them in
heat for five minutes, add lots of sugar, and some green cardamom powder

Yummy!

Lunchtime: Nisha’s Sweet Aloo [en]

[fr] Encore une recette indienne de Nisha.

Another recipe! I already have one of Nisha’s aloo recipes from my last or previous visit (aloo = potato) — I have it in my notes but haven’t published it here yet — here’s another, more saucy one, and somewhat sweet (not that sweet, though).

So, here we go:

in enough oil, add mustard and cumin seeds, curry leaves, and salt (the mustard seeds start popping when you put them in if the oil is hot enough, and the curry leaves will fizz — give them a few seconds before continuing)
chopped onion: add and let it soften
then, add red chili powder (quite a bit — Nisha added a teaspoon and a half for two smallish potatoes… a good handful when chopped up), garlic/ginger paste (Nisha liked my idea of freezing it in an ice-cube tray), coriander powder, and goda masala
add in the potatoes, a tomato, enough water, and cook
after a while add in some jaggery or sugar

Goda masala, which I’m discovering for good today, is a typically Maharashtrian spice mixture. There are of course multiple variations if you want to make your own (see one, two, three for starters). I’m going to buy some to bring back (hear that, Raph?)

Here’s the dish, somewhere in the middle of the cooking process:

And jaggery, if you’d never seen it.

Bon appétit!

Champis vaguement indiens à la Steph [fr]

[en] Tonight's Indian-inspired culinary improvisation with mushrooms.

Allez hop, c’était pas mal bon alors je vous donne la recette (totale impro, donc improvisez par-dessus à votre tour!)

J’avais environ 250g de champignons blancs pour faire ça. Je les ai vaguement lavés (il paraît qu’il faut pas trop laver les champis) et coupés en lamelles.

du beurre au fond de la poêle, bien chauffer sans pour autant le cramer
un quart de petite cuillère de graines de moutarde noire
30 secondes plus tard, une bonne petite cuillère de graines de cumin d’orient (pas le noir, qui pue l’anis)
deux gousses d’aïl écrasées
faire rissoler tout ça jusqu’à ce que ça commence à ne plus sentir l’aïl cru
une demi-cuillère (toujours petite) de turmeric, rissoler un peu aussi
ajouter les champignons, bien touiller pour qu’ils soient aussi uniformément jaunes que possible (pas facile, j’ai pas réussi!)
saler les champignons
comme ils ne voulaient pas suer et que ça commençait à griller, j’ai déglacé avec un tout petit peu d’eau, et hop, le tour était joué
touiller encore, les champignons commencent gentiment à avoir l’air cuits à un moment donné
ajouter feuilles de coriandre et jus de citron (pas trop de citron, enfin, selon le goût)
chauffer encore une petite minute pour répartir les saveurs et réduire le jus
manger!

Isa and Sam's Birthday Salad [en]

[fr] Salade mêlée faite pour les anniversaires d'Isa et Sam. Tomates, oignon doux, poivron vert, piment vert, maïs, pousses de soja, feta, feuilles de coriandre, et une sauce à base d'huile d'olive et de vinaigre balsamique.

Here we go, another quick and dirty salad recipe:

5 San Marzano tomatoes
one large sweet onion
one green bell pepper
one green chilli pepper (chopped fine!)
one box of fresh mung sprouts (blanched)
2 tins of corn
200g of feta cheese
a lot of chopped coriander
mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, poppy, flax, sesame, buckwheat — Coop sells the mix)
dressing: lots of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, some normal vinegar, some lime juice, mustard, tomato concentrate, pepper, salt (enough salt can make the difference between a tasty salad and an unexciting one)

Enjoy!