Maybe I should have made a New Year's resolution to post on this blog. Then again, with the failure rate of New Year's resolutions, I probably wouldn't be posting a lot either way.
Anyway, happy February! Here in the Nowell household, February is a birthday month, so we got to celebrate a double-whammy of Valentine's Day and Joe's birthday within a couple days of each other. Hello, desserts! Always nice to have a reason (or two) to celebrate in the midst of the winter. Not to mention Presidents' Day and my dad's birthday, all on the same day this year.
Lately I've had an interest in trying new recipes. Often this actually means looking up and drooling over recipes, only to file them away and never actually try to make them, but occasionally one makes it past my laziness and gets itself made. On Friday, I tackled some Indian food (not literally) and might have succeeded for the first time in that arena.
I think I had some of my first Indian food during my internship the summer between my junior and senior years of college. That was also the first time I really experienced Thai food, and I vaguely remember really liking the Thai food and not being too sure about the Indian food. Since then I've had a chance to try Indian food a few more times (a lot more times?) and have come to like it, too.
So when an Indian restaurant came to town and brought with it an attached "International Food Market," I figured I ought to check both out. Naturally I have no clue where to even start for cooking my own Indian food, but I thought that if I got a couple of pre-made spice mixes with recipes on the back, I might make a good go of it.
My first attempt was some sort of curry. I think the box said something like "Dump in the spices. You can use less if you want, to taste..." (Kelsey paraphrase) Well, having never made it before with all the spices, I thought I'd just follow the instructions and dump it all in. Let's just say Sarah, Joe, and I were all loading on the plain rice and gulping down milk in an attempt to soothe our burning mouths.
Second attempt was similar. I'm pretty sure I somehow thought this one was going to be less spicy, but alas, for maybe the first time in my life, I was wrong. :) Again, we sought out ways to take away the burn. The taste was good, if you could get past the heat.
Well, this time, I tried a recipe for chicken tikka masala that I found online, after getting excited about some garam masala seasoning I found at Meijer and then wondering what I was going to do with it. Probably the smartest move I made was ignoring the part of the recipe where it said, "At this point, you can add some hot peppers for extra spice if you want." Instead, I went with the regular spices it called for, and we ended up with a dish that was edible. Slight heat, but nothing unbearable. Success! I also made my 2nd attempt at homemade naan, and I'd say this was a much better run, too. So all in all, my kitchen skills are improving. Or my recipe finding skills are.
Or maybe just my "I'm hungry, so anything tastes good" skills.
