Printer Friendly Email a friend

This is the thing about the great big wonderful world of blogs– are you listening? Blogs can open you up to a whole great big wonderful world!

Yesterday I was over at No Recipes. He posted a delicious and very Marc looking Aloo Gobi, which is an Indian dish of spiced cauliflower with potatoes. Something about it hit me just the right way. So I decided right then that I would make it for lunch– immediately.

This is not the type of thing I usually cook. In fact this is the kind of thing I usually reserve for restaurants. It’s not that I can’t cook food like this. I just proved (at least to myself) that I can. But for some reason I just don’t… but I guess that is a question between my pantry and me.

Speaking of my pantry, my pantry gets a lot of the credit for the success of today. I keep my pantry in tip-top shape. You never know when it’s going to get a strong work out from a difficult challenger. This Indian spiced dish is a perfect example of the kind of preparedness I am talking about because I was able to read Marc’s post and look at his pictures and start right in on cooking my version with in a few moments. So I am pretty proud of that fact.

I reproduced Marc’s recipe here for you word for word. So the “recipe” part is fully creditable to No Recipes… there is an irony there that I am sure Marc has to deal with all the time. So I’ll just note the irony and move on.

Because in true No Recipes fashion I used this recipe as a road map in making the Aloo Gobi you see in the pictures here today. I’ll let you in on a little secret, the strength of my pantry does not lie in the fact that I have every single thing I could EVER need tucked away inside. Would were it so. Instead I have enough things from enough broad categories to make this dish with the ingredients that I had on hand. So it’s true I had to make a few substitutions and altered a few things to the way I cook.

I used less pungent yellow mustard seeds in place of Marc’s very authentic black mustard seeds. To make up for the lack of pungency I added a few caraway seeds. Good caraway seeds from South America, which may be different than the variety you are used to.

As I said I don’t cook Indian very often, so I did not have any garam masala– but a bit of extra cumin in the form of powder, some excellent smoked paprika and a touch of cinnamon made up for that fact.

Also, I can’t add fragrant spices to a pan of hot oil with out balancing all the spice with a little sweet. I just can’t. Marc suggested honey. But I used a big scoop of left over, very caramelized onions instead.

I think Marc would be ok with these changes. After all, I become acquainted with his excellent blog when I heard him interviewed on NPR. I liked his whole No Recipes approach. Because despite the fact that I have a blog and I am passing out recipes on an almost daily basis (many of them original)… mostly I cook by the seat of my pants and then make it all sound well planned and intellectually well developed!

Shhh, don’t tell anyone.

Aloo Gobi serves 4 CLICK here for a printable recipe