Week 7: Pumpkin Tomato Curry and Chandra Malai Kofta

Pumpkin curry

This was a surprisingly easy recipe from a random Penguin curry book I have, that I discovered when flipping through my cookbooks for something to do with the Pumpkin I had.

Oh man, I wish I could transmit scent through this blog because it smelled amazing, with just the Pumpkin, vegan butter and Cumin seeds. Mmm.

Quick, easy and delicious, this is going to be one of my new staples, along with the chickpea curry I love. The only ingredients in this really are Pumpkin, ghee, Cumin seeds, onion, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, turmeric and Chili. I also added amchoor powder because I had it and thought it might add to the flavour.

I was craving the Pumpkin Lakhnawi from my favourite Indian takeaway place and this really hit the spot.

Malai Kofta

This was actually a lot easier than I'd thought, providing you remember to soak the nuts or as Isa says "always be soaking"! Which I am not, but luckily I did remember.

I like that this is made mostly from ingredients I usually have on hand (except Panko Crumbs). :-)

The kofta mixture came out a little too wet, so I added some more Panko Crumbs, but then it didn't hold together super well when frying (side note: I am always frying with Coconut oil from now on. Yum.), maybe because I tried to chop the Zucchini instead of shredding it finely due to not being able to locate my grater. Oh well.

The sauce was super thick and creamy and amazing. If anything, maybe slightly too rich, but so worth the time put in. It would be equally as good just poured over some steamed veggies. Definitely making again!

Time for food porn photos:

Week 1: Puffy Pillow Pancakes

Hello and welcome to the Kate Cooks Actual Recipes From Her Too Many Cookbooks challenge! (Otherwise known as Challenge Accepted)

When I came to realise recently that I own over 40 cookbooks (and counting), yet have probably only used two or three recipes from many of the books, I decided to challenge myself to cook new things, and this project was born.

After seeing Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's live cooking demonstration recently, this week I decided to make Puffy Pillow Pancakes from my (brand new) Isa Does It cookbook.

Isa Does It

Now, my previous attempts at pancake making have resulted in at best, soggy crumbly piles of dough, so I was a little sceptical that mine could turn out like the inch-thick pancakes in the book.

The first batch didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd hoped, were difficult to flip and resulted in a few pieces of reject pancake (which then prompted a cloud-shape type debate on Facebook over what they looked like):

(Feel free to add your guesses in the comments)

But! When I actually followed Isa's advice about not crowding the pan with more than two pancakes at a time, they turned out almost perfectly! Voila:

Mmmm, pancakes.

Next time I think I might add some different flavours in the batter, like orange zest. :-)

Next Week: Steamed BBQ Buns from Terry Hope Romero's Vegan Eats World.