International Cooking

I wanted to try some new reicpes this weekend and decided to try some Indian cuisine – despite my low tolerance of spicy food.

I did a Google search for Indian dishes with chicken in them and came up with Murg Jalfraizee (Chicken with Green Bell Peppers). In fact, I substituted the green peppers for yellow and red ones because I had them on hand, and used onions, garlic and ginger instead of pastes, but the meal turned out very tasty – much better than I had anticipated.

It’s not that I’m a bad cook, I’m able to pull of, say, Italian dishes quite well, but I usually need some practice with a new cuisine until I understand how the spices work or how a certain way of preparing food works.

In fact, it was so yummy that I’m going to try another new recipe tomorrow: Chicken Kundapuri. The Murg Korma (Cashew Chicken) also sounds great – maybe next weekend?

Unfortunately, there are very few Indian restaurants in Germany (maybe because most Germans don’t like hot food?), so I have only tasted real Indian food once or twice and can’t really tell if my concoction comes close to real Indian food, but it sure was fun to cook and a new kind of taste in our daily fare. If you’ve got a tried ‘n true Indian recipe you think I should try, feel free to post the recipe (or a link) in the comments! I’m also keen on trying some Thai or Indonesian dishes.

I also did some research on Indian Cuisine (and cooking in general) this afternoon and found some useful questions – and answers – at Ask MetaFilter:

• A thread on how to start cooking Indian style
• Another on how to cook papapds/pappadams
• Because I also like Mexican food: Looking for an extraordinary guacamole recipe
• A herb that is common in both cuisines is coriander or cilantro. I didn’t know that it tastes differently to different people.