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On a trip to a local Indian grocer I picked up a couple of sauce packets and I was planning to make one up tonight however when I read the directions it says to add 300g of curd to the pan with the chicken and sauce pack. What do they mean by curd? If it helps any the dish is Chicken Sukha and the brand is Parampara.

Howdy! Decided to be adventurous and buy 5 different brands of Mango pickle: Swad, Ahmed, Patak's, and two others. Have tried 3 so far and each is so incredibly salty that I can't bear to take another bite. I like salty food, but this is unreal. I threw away a ginger pickle a few weeks ago because it was way too salty. And when I ordered a mixed pickle at local restaurant it was also inedible. So what's the secret here? Is it an acquired taste? Should I be burying a miniscule amount of it in a huge bowl of rice?

I'm not an expert on Indian food, although I'm quite fond of eating Southern dosas and utthapam, and probably can make a few passable vegetable or channa masalas, some ugly chapati, and a really nice mushroom cashew curry, one rare case where I actually follow a recipe. I feel no problem improvising with Japanese, Chinese, or vaguely Italian foods, but I'm never quite comfortable calling my Indian-influenced dishes Indian. When I'm improvising, without referring to cookbooks, I would say this is "Jason cooking with a little too much garam masala in the house." I never really follow the cookbooks precisely anyway. But every once in a while I crave something with some mustard seeds, cumin, coriander seeds, ghee and salt, some garam masala, etc. More particularly, last night I was craving some lentils and some light soupy thing. So I made three dishes. One was a simple grilled eggplant dish with some lime juice, chilies, cilantro, and sweet onions. The other was something like a rasam, though slightly big in proportion compared to how I've usually had it served to me. Another was a kind of lentil kofta with a spiced tomato cream sauce. I'm not sure what it would take to feel like I'm not cheating somehow by improvising. In my Chinese cooking, after my Chinese neighbors in Germany started requesting me to make something, I started to feel like I had passed a certain point of knowledge. With Japanese cooking, my favorite cookbook encouraged improvisation, and I was later better informed by frequent travel to Japan. I cook Indian-ish dishes so rarely that I think it would take a few months of obsessive experimentation, dinner parties and so on before I would feel like I know anything. So here was last night's dinner... Blog entry: Craving soup and lentils

My wife keeps telling me that our kitchen smells like dead rodents courtesy of the tiny bottle of asafoetida I have in the spice drawer. It's wrapped in 3 ziplock bags, but apparently that isn't good enough to keep it from smelling up that sector of the kitchen. Any suggestions on how to store it?

In a few weeks I'll be hosting a wine dinner at a favorite Indian restaurant. For sure we'll be having vegetable pakoras and tandoori lamb with various naan for starters and continue on with a few curries with kashmiri biryani. For the starters I plan to go with whites, probably an Alsatian Gewurztraminer and a demi-sec Vouvray. But for the curry, I'd like to switch to some reds. Would Burgundy work? Cru Beaujolais? Amarone? Anyone tried a successful red wine matching with curry?

I love eating Indian food, especially curries, tandoori meats, and of course the breads. And I do love the taste of biryani dishes, both meats and Kashmiri style. Unfortunately, with eating biryani I get some kind of stomach allergy. I still eat it every now and then, though, sometimes mixing it with plain rice to make it milder but I still end up with the stomach upset. I wonder what's causing it? Anyone have the same experience or venture a guess? Thanks.

Is ketchup a commonly used condiment in the Indian kitchen? Yesterday I attended a wonderful Indian festival here in Tokyo and on my first trip around the food booths, I picked up samosas, pakoras and shish kebabs. These were ordered from 3 different booths and they were all served with a side of ketchup, for the shish kebeb it was actually squirted down the whole length of the kebab. A later purchases of more pakoras at yet another booth was not served with it though. Are these foods normally served with ketchup? I have never been served them this way in a restaurant.

I wonder if any of you have had a similar experience.Often when i make a paste of onions in a blender,it gets very bitter.The first time this happened,i did not even realise it and proceeded to fry it in oil,add the usual masalas etc and made a gravy.But when we ate it,the gravy was positively bitter.After that,everytime i made the onion paste,i would first taste it raw and throw out the whole lot if it were bitter.All this was very wasteful,not to mention irritating.After that i started either grating the onions,or chopping them very fine and than proceeding to fry in oil,but when i needed a really smooth gravy,i had to put the whole thing in a blender after it was done or use my stick blender.The cleaning was painful,because the paste would be oily after having been roasted in oil.All in all very cumbersome! Of late ,this does not happen,and also if i process the onions in a food processor as opposed to a blender,it seems to help too. Wanted to know if any of you folks had encountered the same problem and if you have any solution for it. thanks

We've been asked to do a theme dinner for some students and one of the suggested recipes is for "Makkai di roti". It calls for maize flour as well as wheat flour. I think of maize as corn but that doesn't seem right. There is also no leavening in the recipe. So - what is maize flour and should we add a leavening agent?

A new restuarant recently opened in vancouver with a Sri Lankan family making hoppers. Are these a staple item in Sri Lankan homes? This restaurant gives you three on a plate, one with a soft poached egg in the middle, along with a choice of curry, shredded coconut and chutney. I've never seen these before. Any background information would be great. Stephen Vancouver

Tonight we tried frozen Peas Paratha, made by Pillsbury, India. We thought it was very tasty and I'd like to know how to make it from scratch. I can probably figure out the dough from other paratha recipes on eGullet, but would like to know how to make the nicely seasoned filling. Ingredients are: flour, peas, water, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, coriander, salt, glycerol [dough conditioner ???] onion, modified tapioca starch, cumin, green chillies, mango [amchur powder???], turmeric, chilli powder. TIA!

I recently made a recipe from Everyday Food Magazine called Tandoori chicken. Having actually had Tandoori chicken once I knew there's more to it than yogurt, tumeric, garlic, ginger and two bone-in skinless chicken breast halves. Then recently I was watching Mark Bittman on TV and he was using tandoori paste. I didn't know there was premade Tandoori paste, so I went to a nearby market that I pass often named Chatterjee Grocery which I suspected was an Indian market. With the help of a very polite elderly gentleman I bought a bottle of Nirav tandoori paste. It was a very funky place but as I reminded myself, while gingerly examining things, it wasn't quite as High Funk as my favorite oriental grocery. The bottle gives a recipe for Tandoori Chicken, which starts off "mix the beaten yogurt wit the tandoori paste" so I went to the Nirav website which seems to assume you wouldn't even be there if you didn't know the basics. I then googled Tandoori and found two recipes, one for Cornish Hens (which is what I wanted to cook) but requires making your own Tandoori Masala. The other was for tandoori turkey bits and said to mix 1 tablespoon tandoori paste to 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 3 tablespoons yogurt. Since I was doing a Cornish Hen I doubled the ingredients, and the resuslts were disaqppointing. Also there wasn't much to the tandoori paste, yogurt mixture, and on the show with Bittman, the food was dripping tandoori paste. I also broiled the hens, since I only have an electric range. So, assuming I would like to cook tandoori chicken legs, using two whole legs, what proportion of tandoori paste to yogurt should I use, what else should I add to the mixture, and how long should I marinate it? Should I bake or broil, and if baking, at what temperature? I know it won't be the real thing, but I would like to achieve a result that is a bit less unlike the real thing.

Were you adult, or did you start very young? Did you get it right away, or was there trial and error (funny stories please?) Mine: I was raised "good for nothing" in typical middle class Indian style, as kids we were told mainly to study and housework was seen as time-waste. This was often a point of argument between Amma and Appa, as Appa would order us out of the kitchen and tell us to study or play sports, saying "fumes will make you cough, the knives and stoves are dangerous" etc. Amma would grumble "how come it's OK for me to stew in the kitchen, but for the three daughters it's off limits?" etc. So I never learnt to cook until young adult, and I left home for college, and suddenly discovered the joys of home cooking and I used to telephone home for uppuma recipes, and Amma used to screech: You are paying long distance charges for upma recipe? Rs 300 to learn to make uppuma? Are you crazy? etc. But I finally got the hang of it.... My mother's story was even more drastic; as her father was a senior govt official and they had (rough estimate) 2 servants for every domestic function. So she was in for a rude awakening after marriage. She used to try and make from cookbooks and produce awful messes, and my dad would patiently eat them while keeping the cookbook propped open so he could at least feast his eyes and imagination on the glorious pictures. Her first dinner party, she owed many other families in Appa's regiment, and by that time she could manage almost everything except the non-veg. So a khansama was arranged from the military mess. THe party was at 7 pm and he did not show up until 3, and came dead drunk, carrying a live chicken upside down, hanging by the feet. He parked it on the verandah and instructed my horrified mother to feed it a few drops of vinegar from time to time to tenderize it. Then he disappeared and Amma was stuck with this crazy situation. Much panic later he showed up at 6: 30, even more drunk, and Amma disappeared. A few squawks and feathers flying later, the chicken was perfectly cooked and on the table in time for the party.... edited to add: Amma is now an absolutely fantastic cook, though she still claims to dislike it and hates all housework (I mean, who really likes to clean?) In stark contrast, my Montessori educated kids learn "life skills" in pre-school (ages 3 to 6) and can already slice veggies, grate and peel things, and my now 8yo has taken to cooking very handily and can make chapatis and all kinds of other things that still challenge me... My father still insists on shooing them out of the kitchen and I have to go in and rescue them. Everyone is still horrified when both kids love to sweep and swab (jhadoo poncha) and I hear muttering behind my back (paying so much for expensive education to do this kind of thing??) So: how was it with others? Milagai

I had lunch today at the Indian Supper club in the worldgate center in reston. They have the lunch time buffet for $9. I have been to a lot of indian buffets and i can definetly say that this was the worst indian buffet I've ever eaten. The rice was greasy (i'm assuming alot of ghee), the quality of rice used was poor, the selection of condiments and dishes was limited. What was there was bland and poor. I will not go back to this place. What a waste of time and money.

I asked this question previously on another thread - but we are looking for a good South Indian or Sri Lankan restaurant in the lower mainland. Something seriously spicy. Any leads would be much appreciated.

So due to a variety of factors I have decided to cook Indian for the next 3 months. Pursuant to that I purchased the other day a coffee grinder for spice-related grinding. Today and tomorrow I will be stocking the pantry with whatever other hardware and software is necessary. So I'm interested in hearing what are the staples of the Indian pantry. wet ingredients, dry ingredients, canned stuff, whatnot. So far on the list: Spices peppercorns fenugreek cumin kalonji cloves cinnamon Other dry: basmati rice chick peas wet onion garlic ginger I know I can gather a list like this by making a bunch of indian dishes and seeing what spices they need, but I'm looking to get a ready to go pantry so that when I get ready to cook I already have some of the shopping done. Many thanks, Ben

Murgh Vindaloo -- Portuguese Style Chicken, or Vinegar Chicken. From Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking, Recipes by Raghavan Iyer, p. 104. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome! I was introduced to Indian cooking on Rushholme's (in)famous Curry Mile when going to college in Manchester. I'd never tasted any Indian food before, and refused to eat the first curry I was served -- I thought there was something wrong with it; that the food had gone bad... But since poor students in the area ate Indian all the time, I eventually learned to enjoy it -- first through mild, spinach based dishes, but by the time I graduated, I was a veritable vindaloo-overdosing, lager-lout, and making unpleasant jokes about keeping the bogrolls in the fridge. I've (unsuccessfully) kept trying to recreate the English Indian Vindaloo, since American Indian restaurants just don't do the same thing, but I've also cooked several dishes from this excellent book, that seems more authentic Indian, than the British curry house. And since I probably couldn't cope with a fiery English Vindaloo anymore -- and since I remember thinking, when I first tasted them, that I wished there was a way to enjoy the great flavor, but without the heat, I figured I'd give this one a go. This is a fairly detailed log of how it went, along with some notes about how I diverged from the recipe. The ingredients, prepped from right to left, by the order they are used: - 1 very large red onion (recipe called for 2 medium -- I assume they meant yellow, but this is all I had); - 6 cloves garlic, 1.5" ginger both coarsely chopped (they called for a little less, and also for this to be added along with the onions, but I find that ginger and garlic loses all their flavor if cooked along, so I hold off for a bit); - 3/4 cup tomato sauce, along with 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tbsp ground coriander seeds, 1/4 tsp ground turmeric, 1.5 tsp cayenne pepper and 1/2 tsp ground cumin seeds (recipe called for 1/2 tsp cayenne, but since it isn't originally a spicy dish, I added more -- recipe also called for 1 tsp ground cumin, but since I use freshly ground cumin seeds, it turns out WAY more powerful than pre-ground cumin. I find it hard to believe that this book expects pre-ground cumin, but it just completely overpowers any dishes that I cook from it, if I use the full amount). This is all loaded up in the tomato sauce can just for convenience, so I can just dump the can afterwards, without dirtying up an extra meez thingie. - 2 chicken breasts, cut into pieces. - 1/2 cup coconut milk, 1/4 cup white wine vinegar (in the coconut milk can). - 1/4 cup yogurt. Start off with some oil at med-high heat and add 2 onions, coarsely chopped. Cook until onion gets golden brown, and add1 tbsp ginger and 5 cloves garlic -- also coarsely chopped. This goes against the recipe, which calls for all three ingredients to be added at the start -- I find the garlic and ginger flavor dissipates that way... Also, the recipe calls for a 5 min cooking time, which is less than half the time it takes for the onion to get golden brown. Nearly EVERY cooking book I've used completely underestimates the cooking time like this. Are these recipes all created in the Iron Chef kitchen, where they have monstrous wok burners that put out the equivalent of an F-16 on afterburner? 5 minutes on medium high = golden brown onions, my ass! After 5-6 minutes, I add the ginger and garlic, and let it cook for a few more minutes. Now, once the onions are "golden brown" (or I guess that they would have been, if they were yellow onions), I add 3/4 cup tomato sauce, 1 tbsp coriander seeds, 1 tsp cumin seeds, 1/4 tsp turmeric, and 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper -- all ground, bring it to a simmer, and leave it partially covered for 5 minutes. A thin film of oil is supposed to form on the surface. This is the sauce. Pop it in the blender, and return to the pan. Add 1 lb. chopped chicken breasts, and let cook for 5 minutes. Stir in 1/4 cup white vinegar and 1/2 cup coconut milk, and cook until chicken is done. (Oops, I wanted to take the picture just after I added this, but I forgot, and stirred it in before taking the picture. Doh). Finally, whisk 1/4 cup plain nonfat (or regular) yogurt until it is smooth, mix it in, and let it warm up. The yogurt and coconut milk helps smooth out the sharp, bitter taste of the vinegar. Serve with rice, and/or nan bread of your choice. I really liked the result of this recipe. It was slightly hot, but certainly nowhere NEAR the typical English Vindaloo. Most importantly, it had a truly wonderful taste, even though the vinegar taste came on a bit too strong. So next time around, I'll go easier on the vinegar -- and make sure to have some yellow onions on hand. Edit: Murgh, not Mungh -- but can't change the subject, though...

Hi all, I am looking for a recipe to make panjiri. Any out there? I was advised to eat a little with lunch and dinner after delivery because of its restorative properties.

Pork Vindaloo In this Murgh Vindaloo thread, I learned a lot (particularly from Waaza) about the vindaloo. One of the things I learned is that it makes a lot more sense to do it with pork (which is how the dish was originally made). So here goes... The recipe: 1 lb pork cut into bite-sized pieces 1 tbsp ground coriander seeds 1 tsp fenugreek seeds ½ tsp cumin seeds 1 segment of star aniseed 5 garlic cloves 2" ginger 4 crushed/chopped dried red chilies ½ tsp ground turmeric Garam masala ¼ cup vinegar 1 tbsp oil 1. Roast coriander- fenugreek- cumin- and star aniseed seeds. I didn't roast them a lot. Also, I kinda screwed up with the star aniseed -- I just cut a segment off and roasted it, rather than removing the seed. I removed the seed later. 2. Grind them along with garlic, ginger and chilies. 3. Add turmeric, garam masala, vinegar and oil, grind some more. One thing I am worried about here, is that there are an awful lot of different spices mixed in here. I would prefer to be able to distinguish the different tastes, not so much because of the culinary experience, as much as I'd like to be able to tell if I've used too much or too little of a certain spice. Was going to use a blender to mix it together, but I opted to just stick with the mortar and pestle, rather than dirtying up another item. 4. Marinade with pork overnight. I used a vacuum marinade container, and marinated it about three hours, rather than overnight. The marinade isn't very liquid (but it was starting to smell really good at this point). After I removed the pork, you can see there is very little marinade left. 5. Finely chop 2 med yellow onions. I only had one onion, but it was a big one so I figured it'd be okay. However, the cooking process renders it down so much, I think I'll definitely use two the next time around. I'm pretty fond of chopping things with a normal chef's knife, but a proper mandolin makes short work of the "finely chopped" part of the recipe. I was originally planning on trying to dry the water from the onion, but part of the advice I got in the aforementioned thread said to just make sure to cook it as soon as I'd chopped it. And I made sure to not cut off too much from the end of the onions, since those bits contain a lot of good stuff that makes the onions sweet. 6. Cook onions over medium heat until golden, 15-20 minutes. Not quite golden after 13 minutes or so -- but I think the photo shows the color a little too pale. I turned the heat up to med-high towards the end, in anticipation of adding the meat. 7. Remove meat from marinade and cook it until browned. With Chinese stir-fry recipes, I'd normally brown the meat first, remove it from the wok, and put it back in after the onions were done -- I'm thinking this might be a good idea with this dish too. Because I think the one thing that marred this dish, was that the onions were slightly burned while the meat was browned. This process took about 15 minutes. 8. Reduce heat to low, add remaining marinade, cook until dry. There was just a tablespoon of marinade left, but I added it, and cooked it until dry. 9. Add ¼ cup water, cook until dry again This method of drying the dish out is apparently know as the bhuna stage -- or a bhuna cooking method, like stir-frying. 10. Add ¾ cup tomato sauce, simmer 10-15 min. Mix the tomato sauce in properly... Looking good -- the color is starting to look about right. Okay, that looks just about done. Just the right color. Serve over rice, and sprinkle with some parsley (I dunno how authentic that is, but the color looks good, hehe). Post-meal analysis: It was quite good, but there were two things I disliked. One, the meal left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, which I believe is because I cooked the dish slightly too fast (a total of about 45 minutes), over slightly too high heat. Two, the meat wasn't very tender, which I think was caused by the shortened cooking time, or possibly because of a shortened marinade period (does vinegar tenderize meat the way citrus juices do?). I used a pork sirloin -- when braising cubed pork, I normally go for a cheaper cut. The good thing was that the nice vinegar flavor wasn't overpowering, as with the Murgh Vindaloo. But then again, I used a mild rice vinegar this time, rather than the red wine vinegar, that I think I used last time. Some conclusions -- Next time, I'll cook it slower, at lower temperatures. -- The Murgh Vindaloo dish (previously mentioned thread) tasted a bit more like the Vindaloos I tasted in Britain, but I think part of this may be that I overheated this pork dish. -- Cooked at this pace, the chicken would have been more tender, yet the vinegar wouldn't have been as overpowering (as in the last dish). -- When I first started eating curries in Rusholme, there were four "strengths": Mild, Medium, Madras and Vindaloo. I used to wish for a mild Vindaloo -- well, now I know there's such a thing. I'm not there just yet with the recipe, but I figure I can get there from here. Finally, a couple of questions: Ever heard about a dish called Phal? I came across it in Wokingham, and it was labeled as being stronger than a Vindaloo -- and it was. It was also very tasty, but so strong I could only eat about a third of it. This "Betty Crocker Indian Home Cooking: Recipes by Raghavan Iyer" book I've got has some good information on Vindaloo (about the Portuguese in Goa and vinegar), and it also mentions a dish called Sorpotel -- Pork in Cashews. It is also a pork and vinegar dish. Anyone familiar with this dish? Any comments, questions, and criticism welcome.

Hi all, I just build tandoor at home using 55 gal. drum, castable refractory, fire bricks & clay pot. I am new to this forum so I do not know how to post the pictures. you can contact me at schokshi@ford.com or you can post your inquiries here. I will be more than happy to share lessons learned during this project.

A few years ago, my roommate's mom brought a large container of homemade murukku when she came to visit. I'd never had murukku before, but was instantly hooked: her version was crunchy, light and nicely spiced. I'd sneak into the kitchen at night just to dip into that container. I've tried since then to locate a similar version in local Indian snack shops, but they've all been hard without any spices. My roommate promised me her mom's recipe, but, alas, I never got hold of it. Since then, I've printed out many recipes off the internet, but I have no idea which will make a similar version. I'm thinking that perhaps it had butter in it, since it was light, not heavy. It also must have had red pepper in it, since it was spicy. Can anyone help with locating a delicious, spiced murukku recipe? I picked up a mix that just contains various flours/ground beans in it, so I could possibly add butter, water and various spices and try that. Hilary

I'm sure this has been discussed, but following on Monica's excellent food blog I'm curious as to your overall preference: North Indian or South Indian? I am most definitely South, as I feel there's more variety, better presentation of the vegetable's natural taste and texture, and although I'm a carnivore I don't really find Indian meat dishes all that they're cracked up to be (save Vindaloo, Dhansak and the odd tandoori craving). South India totally redefined how I look at lentils, okra and coconut. And if the heat of it (I thought Andhra Pradesh would give me a heart attack) doesn't kill you it most certainly makes you stronger.

Julie Sahni has a recipe for "Lentils with Garlic Butter" that appears all over the 'net (sometimes credited to other authors). It calls for 1.5 cups of pink or yellow lentils simmered in 5 cups of water -- with added turmeric -- until tender, and then pureed in the pot. The recipe continues from there. I just finished doing this, and I'm greatly confused. I ended up with nearly 6 cups -- almost all water, of course. The lentils are certainly cooked through, but rather than a lentil dish, this is like an extremely thin soup. Is this the way the dish is supposed to be? It seems unservable, but it's such a simple recipe and I can't imagine where I might've gone wrong.

I'm looking for a superb Chicken Korma recipe. I've looked around the 'net and so many recipes seem to be met with the criticism "too bland." I'm not looking for 100,000 Scoville Units, but I would like a dish with impact...unless Chicken Korma's just not supposed to have impact. None of my go-to books and sources seem to have this recipe. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Dear All Diwali is just couple of months away. I need suggestions about menu for Diwali party. I would be expecting around 60-70 guests and its not a formal dinner. It is more like open house where people can come in the evening at their convenient time. I need to serve plenty of snacks like items which are tradional as well as can kind of substitute for dinner. Would greatly appreciate suggestions.....