Aloo Gobi for Louise's Picnic Game

I'm going on a picnic and bringing Aloo Gobi, an Indian dish with potatoes and cauliflower. It's a virtual picnic that takes place July 1. So...

Happy Picnic Day

Louise at Months of Edible Celebrations has come back to blogging and is organizing her popular picnic game where at least 26 bloggers create an alphabetical picnic menu, beginning here with A for Aloo Gobi. On July 1, she will post a list of all 26 dishes, with photos!

Actually, I really did bring real, not virtual aloo gobi on a picnic while I was in Aspen recently; I shared it with one of the Tuesday night barbecues at the Aspen Center for Physics. It's a good dish for a picnic because it's supposed to be served at room temperature.

Here's what it looked like towards the end of cooking, before being garnished with cilantro leaves:

Aloo Gobi made May, 2013 in Aspen, Colorado

I first became aware of this delicious dish around 4 years ago when I saw the film "Bend it Like Beckham." As I wrote in an earlier post about this dish, the heroine of the film wants to be a soccer player, and is very good at it, but her parents believe that it's better to make good aloo gobi than to "bend it like Beckham" -- another concept, this from soccer, that I learned from the film. The line is pretty memorable, but what's very memorable is the DVD extra of the film director, Gurinder Chadha, in the kitchen with her mother and her aunties, who watch and give advice while she's trying to explain to her audience how to make aloo gobi. This extra feature is fabulous, maybe better than the film itself.

One of my earlier efforts to make aloo gobi looked like this:

Aloo Gobi made April, 2009 in La Jolla, California

When I eat in an Indian restaurant, I often try to sample the aloo gobi, which always contains a number of spices along with aloo and gobi (cauliflower and potatoes), and sometimes contains tomatoes and sometimes not. An example of the dish with little or no tomato:

Aloo Gobi at Host Restaurant in Toronto

We had a great meal including the above dish a couple of years ago with our friends Rashmi and Kappu. Kappu sent me her aloo-gobi recipe that I followed last month. I didn't have the turmeric and paprika, but I did have all the fresh spices, cumin, and garam masala, a delicious Indian spice blend that's also good on other things.

Kappu’s Aloo Gobi

Ingredients 

1/4 C Oil (Vegetable or Olive)

1 large Onion- cut into thin slices and each slice cut in half crosswise

1 T cumin seeds

1/2 bunch fresh cilantro – leaves chopped and set aside separately.

1 t turmeric

1/2 t paprika

  salt to taste

2 to 3- Serrano or any green chillis – chopped (depending on how hot you like)

2 large whole tomatoes, chopped

3-4 cloves garlic – minced

2 T fresh ginger – peeled and grated

1 med – large cauliflower, broken into floweret

3 medium potatoes – peeled and cut into 1” cubes.

2 T water

1 t Garam Masala

1 T unsalted butter or ghee

Directions

Heat oil in dutch oven, or large pan with cover, over med- high heat.  Add onion and stir till translucent.  Add cumin seeds.  Cook until onions are light brown – do not burn them. Stir.  Add turmeric, paprika and salt; stir.  Add chillis, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, potatoes & cauliflower and mix till everything is well coated.  Add 2+ T water, stir and cover.   Reduce heat to medium low and let simmer for 20 minutes until the cauliflower is cooked. Stir and add Garam Masala, stir again.  Sprinkle 1 T of unsalted butter or ghee, and cilantro leaves on top of the curry, cover and turn heat off.  Let it sit for as long as possible before serving – up to 15 min.

p.s. Do not cook after adding the garam masala.

Bon appetite

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