The link to the original recipe is here:
This is a great recipe to make when you're in the doldrums of a lingering autumn cold. Fresh veggies have vitamins, right? And the spice kicks you in the nose and breaks up some of the congestion. Even if you're not sick, this is wonderful comfort food.
Put on a pot of rice to cook. For extra nutrition points, use brown rice, or as we do, half-and-half brown and white. (Start the brown rice according to directions. Cook half the cooking time specified. Add white rice, and some extra water. Bring back up to boil and cook according to directions. Voila!)
Then, here are her directions:
Microwave a whole head of cauliflower, leaves and core discarded, in two cups of water for 5 minutes or until tender. Meanwhile, warm a large pan, preferably one with a cover, and add the following ingredients:
3 tbsps vegetable oil
4 minced cloves of garlic
1 tsp grated fresh ginger, or 1/2 tsp powdered ginger
2 tbsps curry powder
1 tbsp turmeric
2 tsps whole coriander seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 bay leaf
1 medium onion, minced
1 hot pepper, minced (optional)
Sweat until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the cauliflower, including the water it was cooked in, and:
2 cups chopped tomato (fresh or canned according to season)
Stir well, coating the cauliflower with the other ingredients. It will break up into smaller florets as it cooks. Reduce to a steady simmer and let it cook, covered, for 15 minutes.
(I would put that in the quote tag but it makes it huge, so that's not easy to read.)
About 4-5 minutes before the end, she recommends mashing a tablespoon of butter with a tablespoon of flour, and mixing that paste into the sauce of the cooking veggies.
Last night I did one better, and in a separate pan, I combined a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of flour, and about half a cup of heavy cream. (I have too much heavy cream in the house. don't ask why. Regular milk would have worked fine.) I then added several cups of the sauce to this mix, just to see if it would curdle. It didn't, so I brought it up to nearly a boil to thicken it a little, then dumped it into the cauliflower mixture.
Since I'd added a hot pepper, it was spicy-- I grew the peppers myself and they turned out to be Peppers Of Fiery Doom, for some reason, this year. I never know, when I grow hot peppers, how they'll turn out. So the cream sweetened it and cooled it down a little.
Serve the cauliflower stuff atop the rice, and it's a wonderful hot vegetarian (vegan, if you don't do the butter-cream thing), very filling, very warming dinner. (e:zobar) loves it, and so do I. I have leftovers! Mmmm.
It's kind of bright green from the turmeric. Mmmm. It stained two of my fingernails when I fished out a piece of cauliflower to taste-test.
It's even kind of good if you eat it cold. What? No, I'm not at all cheating on dinner by eating it cold straight out of the fridge.
Mmmmm.
I am woefully ignorant about India and Indians. My roommate freshman year of college was from Madras, and I learned pretty much immediately that I knew nothing. She was one of only two people at our university who spoke her native tongue, which was Tamil, and insisted that it was totally different from Hindi, which she taught herself in like the first week, and then she picked up Urdu in like half an hour, because I guess it's not that different? There were all kinds of Indians who hung out in my room at all hours (claiming to be on Desi Standard Time), and I kept trying to figure them all out but it eluded me. (Also tricky were the fact that many of them were Pakistani, and a few from Bangladesh, but most of them had been raised in other places, like Kenya or Saudi Arabia, because of course, these are not average Indians, they are the wealthy sort who can be educated as undergraduates at a private university in upstate New York.)
So I learned just enough to know that I know absolutely nothing. The previous year I'd spent in the UK, where Indian food is like a combination of Chinese food and pizza-- ubiquitous, and cheap, and simply what you eat after hours when you're drunk. So I miss it, and have ever since been trying to find Indian recipes, only to realize how freaking useless a generalization that is. It's not some little nation, it's a whole subcontinent with like four thousand regional dialects and a whole ocean of "cuisine" studded with distinctive little regional islands that bear no resemblance to one another at all.
(e:zobar) is no help-- his cousin was married, for a while, to an Indian who was also a chef, and their wedding was this incredible buffet of super-authentic "Indian" (again, for those of us who don't know the differences, the details slip through the cracks and we're helpless to be more fine-grained in our taxonomy) cuisine. As he retells it, about 50% of the dishes (unlabeled, of course) were absolutely glorious, 35% were pretty tasty, and 15% made him want to scrape his tongue with sandpaper. He has no recollection of which is which, and so is terrified whenever we go to Indian restaurants-- it's like Russian roulette when you have no idea what anything's called. (I have convinced him that the scrub-your-tongue-with-sandpaper ones probably aren't offered in the fairly Americanized restaurants, and if they were, the staff would probably warn you that they were likely to be an acquired taste, but he remains gun-shy.)
I had meant to put peas in it, now that you mention it. I did add carrots. And the cream-- I know that normally one uses coconut cream, or at least I have before in other recipes, but I didn't have any, and I did have heavy cream.
And I didn't put the full amount of tomatoes in it. I only had Italian-spiced tomatoes and I didn't really want that.
That sounds classic north Indian. :) If it were me cooking, I would totally be inclined to skimp on the oil. I never have had butter or cream at home so they don't come into the picture.
So the interesting part is - I wouldn't have used the tomato and made it liquidy. This dish would taste awesome with rice even without the tomatoes - like a cauliflower vegetable pilaf. I would add peas to it.