Best. Thing. Ever.
I loooove Indian food. I also like attempting to cook Indian food. When I am successful, it is epic delicious. When I fail, it is time to dump it in the trash and call for pizza. I fail more than I succeed, to be honest. So trust me when I tell you that this might be the very best Indian food I have cooked at home.
This is no coincidence: it’s a recipe from Vij’s in Vancouver, which made the Gentleman and I one of the best meals we have ever had in our lives. (The Gentleman declared it his best meal ever.)
I haven’t yet bought Vij’s cookbook, but I made this cabbage in mild mustard seed yogurt curry from a recipe reprinted at The Kitchn. I’ll show you how I made it, and then you can click here for the recipe:
The one you may not have, asafoetida, on the right, is available at all South Asian markets.
Because I am a spice fiend, I had all of the spices on hand: turmeric, asafoetida, cumin, corriander, black mustard seed. (The cumin I actually roasted and ground myself from seeds. This is shockingly easy and beats the pants off of store-bought cumin, but it is a post for another day.) I didn’t have corriander ground, but I have a separate coffee grinder for spices, and so I whacked up some seeds.
You start by cooking the asafoetida and mustard in oil until the seeds pop. Then you add the yogurt and a bunch of spices like so:
Awesomesauce. Literally.
I used full-fat greek yogurt and it didn’t break, which made me feel very impressed with myself. Then I put in all my chopped cabbage and it looked like salad with not enough dressing:
Have faith!
But trust that it will cook down and get saucier. And it is DELICIOUS. I think you may be understanding how much I enjoyed it. Honestly, I made a half-recipe this in order to use up the half-head of cabbage I had in the fridge. I would use the whole head to make a full batch next time. It was even better the next day.
Dig in!
Nice! It’s always fun to hear about more things to do with cabbage. I also had a fairly successful bout of Indian cooking this week (I, too, usually fail), trying to recipes from Susan Feniger’s Street Food cookbook–a red lentil dal and saag with chicken. Apparently, copious amounts of heavy cream and salt do wonders for taste.
Ain’t that the truth! At least this is just full-fat yogurt. It’s pretty healthy for something that tastes so divine.