Category: Dinner

Sri Lankan chicken curry + squash curry (they combine well), with a little rice on top. Yummy.

Sometimes I just want South Asian food I don’t have to cook myself. Which Kevin can actually do a good job of cooking for me, but since we’re also trying to keep our local restaurants alive, it’s a good excuse to order from Khyber Pass. Tandoori chicken, samosa chaat, lamb vindaloo, saag paneer, Goan fish curry, papadum, naan — and it comes with rice and a complimentary veggie curry. Don’t forget the mango lassi.

That’ll do (for several days).

#shoplocal

(makes 1 qt. soup, 15 minutes if you have curried squash on hand)

Let’s say you made a big batch of curried squash, and you eat it for a meal or two, and you still have a fair bit left, and you feel like a change. That’s the perfect time to turn your curry into soup! This also freezes well, if you’d like to make a big batch for a rainy day.

roasted cashews, sultanas, and pepitas for topping, optional

1. Combine curried squash and vegetable broth in a pot and simmer 10-15 minutes, until well blended. Taste and adjust seasonings; you may want a little more salt, pepper, or lime.

2. You can just serve it as is, homestyle, but a nice option is to blend the soup to smoothness (an immersion stick blender makes it easy; be careful if transferring hot soup into a blender).

3. Serve hot, topped with roasted cashews, sultanas, and pepitas (pumpkin seeds).

(1 hr, serves 6-8)

If you’re going to be roasting squash, you can quickly knock up a lovely curry sauce while the squash is cooking. This is a long list of spices, but the process is very simple — just sauté onions with seasonings, add some tang and coconut milk, and you’re basically done. Cashews add protein (and deliciousness), helping to make this a complete meal.

You can use any squash, but I think the combo of butternut and acorn is particularly delicious.

chopped cilantro or other greens to garnish, optional

1. Prep squash with first four seasonings and set squash to roasting, per previous recipe.

2. Sauté onions in oil on medium-high heat, stirring. Add in chilies, ginger, garlic, mustard seed, cumin seed, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom pods, curry leaves, and cashews; sauté until golden.

NOTE: If you’re not strictly vegan, it would be culturally appropriate to add 1-2 t. dried Maldive fish or something similar with the sautéing onions, which will bump up the umami component; if you do that, you may want to reduce salt.

3. Add tamarind paste and coconut milk, stir until well combined. Taste and adjust seasonings — you may want to add a little more curry powder, salt, and/or lime juice. If you want a more liquid sauce, add water and stir to blend well; if you want it thicker, let simmer to desired thickness.

4. When you’re happy with the curry sauce, add cut up roasted squash (if the squash isn’t ready yet, just turn off the heat on the sauce until it is). Roast squash should be somewhat sweet already, but I like adding in some sultanas for added pops of sweetness in the curry, to balance the tang and the spice.

Serve hot with rice or bread. Lovely with sambols and pickles.

(10 minutes prep + 50 minutes roasting time, serves 2)

Roasting in an oven is not a common process in tropical Sri Lanka, but I live in Chicago, and roasting squash brings out the sweetness beautifully. This is a simple dish, super-easy to prep on a night when you’re tired, especially if you’re looking for something warm and comforting.

Squash can be a little difficult to cut up, so I tend to just split it and then roast; it’s easy to peel afterwards. But if you have the energy to peel and cube it raw, then you can get seasonings spread more evenly on all the sides of the cubes.

1 t. jaggery or brown sugar

1. Preheat oven to 450 F.

2. Split squash (or peel and cube), drizzle with oil and seasonings. Place cut side up on foil-covered baking sheet (for ease of clean-up.) Bake about 50 minutes, until tender.

3. Let cool slightly, then peel and cut to bite-size pieces.

Serve hot with rice; I’ve added a topping of fresh micro beet greens here. This is very simple as is — you could add a coconut milk drizzle, another vegetable dish (a varai, perhaps), or a sambol or pickle accompaniment, to add complexity and interest.

This recipe may not quite match up to the photos, since when I was making biryani for New Year’s, I used leftover lamb curry as my base. But it’s basically the same concept. So luxurious — fit for a maharajah’s table.

Lamb Biryani (or Goat, Beef, or Chicken)

Biryani, derived from the Persian word berya, which means fried or roasted, is a rice-based dish made with spices and either lamb, goat, beef, chicken, egg, prawns, or vegetables—your choice! It is generally more strongly spiced than a pilaf (though closely related), and commonly layered as part of its preparation. Sri Lankan biryani is spicier than Indian, and generally served with curries and sambols.

This has a lot of ingredients and may look a bit intimidating, but it’s actually quite straightforward—mostly, you’re just adding everything to one big pot, step-by-step. It isn’t usually everyday food, given that it does take a while to cook, but if you have a special occasion to celebrate, biryani is an impressive crowd-pleaser. It will come out a bit dry, so I would serve it with a curry, or something else that offers a gravy. Even a yogurt raita would work!

Tip: If you don’t have an oven-safe dutch oven, you can start this in a regular large pot and transfer it to a baking dish for the final step.

4 boiled eggs, peeled and sliced in half

7. Serve on a flat dish and decorate with fried sultanas, cashew nuts, and boiled egg halves.

Note: For a fancy preparation, I’ve read that some chefs fry papadum, cut it fine, until it resembles straw, and then use that to concoct a nest; they nestle the biryani with it, and mold chickens out of a combination of mashed potato, butter, and egg yolk. But I’ve never seen or tried that!

What do you do when you have some leftover limp cooked green beans and equally limp roasted carrots that no one in the household wants to eat ? I’d make a poriyal, a sautéed veg. dish common in Sri Lanka and southern India.

No precise recipe here, but basically, heat some mustard seed in oil, add cumin seed, turmeric, salt, a diced onion. If you have the energy to add in some fresh minced ginger and garlic, that’s always good, but not required. Sauté the onion ’til golden-translucent, then add in whatever veg you want.

I did a mix of fresh and leftover — I chopped up a bell pepper and added that to the onions, cooked a few minutes, then added in the leftover green beans and carrots. A few more minutes sautéing, to let it all blend together, and you’re all set with a much more appealing vegetable dish that you had previously.

So we tried another Hello, Fresh recipe. This time, we were much more ready to just modify as desired from the start, now that we had a sense of what it was about. It was supposed to be gouda burgers with tomato jam and potato wedges. When the box arrived, we just put the potatoes in the root vegetable bin, because potatoes + buns seemed like a lot of starch for us in one meal.

We made two plain burgers right away for the kids that night, on the potato buns provided, and they seemed to like them fine, which is not surprising. Kevin and I were having lamb curry, so we skipped the burgers.

Then today, I had a little time, so I tried following the recipe, sort of, for lunch. We skipped the buns, because we wanted a fairly light lunch. The sour cream + mayo + smoked paprika sauce was nice, and I wouldn’t normally think to make something like that, so that’s a nice addition to the week’s meals. There’s quite a bit left (even though we only used half of the sauce ingredients provided), so I probably will make potato wedges at some point for dipping into this. Probably with some grilled shrimp, which I think would be tasty with this sauce.

The tomato jam was less successful, in my opinion. Slice an onion, fine, sauté until browned a bit, good. Add more smoked paprika was interesting — it’s not a spice I normally cook with, and I admit, I found the scent of it once heated in oil a little overwhelming. But I’m sure I’d get used to it. The flavor isn’t too overpowering.

The real problem was the tomatoes — they said to chop these two plum tomatoes, add them to the pan with salt, sugar, chicken stock concentrate, and water, and stir for 2-3 minutes until caramelized. People, you can’t actually caramelize anything in 2-3 minutes. So it was definitely going to take a little longer to cook down to a somewhat jammy consistency — also, the tomatoes in dead of winter were not great, unsurprisingly, and really could’ve used a little tomato paste added in to amp up the tomato flavor. The end result tomato-jam produced according to their recipe was okay, but also a little sad, because it wouldn’t have taken much to make it a lot more flavorful.

We ended up splitting two burgers (no bun) with the sauce, melted gouda, and tomato jam on some sliced cucumber, which was a pretty reasonable lunch for us (1/2 a burger each). Tasty, not too much effort, nice for a change.

I think if you’re going to do a meal kit like this, it really helps if you amend it to the actual portion sizes you want; their original recipe of theirs probably made a meal that provided at least twice the calories we’d normally eat for dinner.

It turns out that when you’re used to making a roast leg of lamb for Christmas dinner and you’re generally serving 6-10 people, but this year you only have two adults and two kids who don’t actually eat masses of lamb on the regular, then you might end up in our situation. Three days after Christmas, we still had a solid three pounds of roast lamb in the fridge, and I had actually had my fill of sliced roast lamb with mint sauce and stuffing, roast lamb sandwiches, etc.

Luckily, it is easy to transform leftover roast meat into a delectable Sri Lankan curry. I don’t have a precise recipe for you here, but basic procedure:

– add 1 can coconut milk (I like Chaokoh)

You should now have a delicious sauce. The meat is already cooked (hopefully on the rarer side for best results), so just add it now, bring it to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer and simmer it for 10-20 minutes, covered, just to let the flavors blend.

Have finished lamb curry with bread or rice. If there’s STILL more than you need, it will freeze beautifully this way, to pull out a month or two from now when the thought of roast lamb is a distant, fragrant memory.

Alternatively, you can now take your lamb curry, and use it to make either a lamb biryani or lamb kottu roti, which would make for a pretty fabulous New Year’s feast dish, letting you take that 3 lbs. of lamb and make enough food to feed a dozen people. We don’t have a dozen people around our place at the moment, but next year…

I call this composition, “Mommy is very tired, so here is a table full of food for you to graze on, please don’t ask me for anything else for at least a week, thank you.”