Tag: Ashish

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Root soup

I got 2 large celeriac roots in my CSA this week. I really have no clue what one does with this but had read a recipe for roasted root vegetables. So I roasted them, along with some carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions and garlic and then I blended it all with chicken stock. It was not terrible but it wasn’t something I’d eat. It tasted vaguely like the chop suey my mother used to make which was just stew with celery and bamboo shoots. In any event, it tasted chinese but without the deliciousness part.

I made it Indian-ish. I added curry powder, ginger, coriander, all the Indian standards. Indian-ish is Ashish’s code word for not-at-all-Indian which is how he regards my attempts at Indian cooking. It’s Indian-ish but not Indian.

Whatever it is, it’s very tasty now.

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Curried grilled vegetables

Ashish assures me that there is nothing like this in Indian cuisine. He even went so far as to read to me out of an Indian cook book about the necessity of doing and serving everything exactly the way it’s supposed to be done. Grilling something, and then serving it half-raw would earn you the scorn of Vishnu. Happily I am not so worried about that and though I can feel Ashish’s amusement at my attempts to make Indian food, he is no longer scornful. So when, on the night before he left I invited family and friends for Indian food I had only mild trepidation. 

The curried grilled vegetables were a hit. Petit pan squash, red, green, yellow peppers and shallots doused with curry oil (I simmered garlic, ginger, cumin and curry powder in oil and then strained it) and then charred all of it on the grill. (Thank you Sur la Table grill pan.)

Ashish is ok with this kind of thing as long as I don’t call it Indian.