Thursday, March 22, 2007

Gingery Cauliflower Soup and... ?????

I recently had the chance to make Madhur Jaffrey's Gingery Cauliflower Soup (which she calls gobi ka soup -- strange that ginger gets mentioned in the English title but not in the Hindi one) from Quick and Easy Indian Cooking. (My dearly loved World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking is coming back to me in a few days, due to the quite obvious realization that there was no law preventing me from inter-library-loaning a book twice. Or, thinking towards the future, three or four times.)

As I do not have a blender, I wasn't able to quite execute the last step of the recipe, and using a hand masher helped to break up the chunks of potato and cauliflower but failed to turn it into the creamy puree it was originally intended to be.

However, it was still tasty, if a little heavy on the ginger (which was probably my fault and not Ms. Jaffrey's -- how much ginger powder is equivalent to "one-inch piece ginger, slivered" anyway?).

I still have plenty of the soup left, but since I had been eating it for the past two days, I thought "mmm... tonight, something different."

With no recipe jumping out at me, I grabbed a large pan and tossed in a little canola oil, a little mustard seed, a little oregano, a little garlic, some ground red pepper... and chickpeas, tomatoes, spinach, and paneer.

I watched delightedly as it simmered into a cornucopia of color. A little salt for taste, and then -- well, this dish was about the tastiest thing I had ever contrived to put together.

And so I'm turning this delicious combination of flavors over to you. But it needs a name. (Maybe it already has one and I don't know it.) I don't think I can call it something from Chrono Trigger this time.

So: be creative, Team Readers! Otherwise I'll have to name it myself, which will be less community-building-style fun...

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