Chapatti with dessicated coconut

I have been craving Indian food recently. I don’t know what it is, as there are many wonderful things to cook, but somehow I keep returning to Indian dishes.

Today I went to an Indian restaurant with a wonderful friend whom I hadn’t seen in a few weeks (way too long for us!). We wanted to sample everything and the abundance of lovely sounding Indian recipes made it extremely hard to choose. When we were making our decision our waiter advised us to also try the Peshwari Nan, a nan bread filled with coconut, fennel seeds, jaggery sugar and possibly raisins. That nan turned out to be the highlight of the evening!

The dishes we picked - samosas and lamb kebabs from the tandoor oven as a starter and tandoori chicken and lamb biryani - were awesome. The presentation was lovely as well, they served the tandoor dishes on a blazing hot marble or stone plate which smoked and smelled amazing. But that sweet nan!

As I am currently too lazy to try and make my own nan bread (and it is a  friday evening, after all, so the supermarkets are closed) I decided to make do with what I do have: chapatti bread, dessicated coconut, jaggery sugar and fennel seeds and make my own concoction which hopefully nears the original.

My take on Peshwari Nan

Ingredients
prebaked chapatti bread
melted butter
dessicated coconut 1 tbsp
pistachio nuts 1 tbsp
1 tsp fennel seeds

Method
1. In a pestle and mortar mix the sugar, dessicated coconut, pistachio nuts and fennel seeds to a paste.
2. Smear some butter on the chapatti, then put a tablespoon of the mix on the chapatti, fold it and bake in the oven. Or bake in a hot, dry pan until the chapatti starts to puff up a bit.

Indonesian salad with coconut and Daging Ketjap

As you can see we are enjoying Indonesian food immensely these days. And what’s not to like? It’s easy to make, tasty and packs a lot of flavour in relatively easy to make food. Recently a new Indonesian cookbook came out ‘Boekoe Kita’ (Our Book) the recipes look amazing and we have tried two of them so far with great succes.

Another thing I really like about this food is that it’s very versatile, if you don’t have or want lamb, you just substitute the lamb for beef and the recipe still tastes amazing! We made this recipe with both lamb and beef, and both versions were extremely tasty. We served the beef and salad with some boiled rice and added sambal to taste. 

Indonesian salad with coconut and Kentjoer
Serves 4

Ingredients
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1,5 tsp trassi, crumbled — (this is dried shrimp paste. This stuff SMELLS but it does add a nice taste - even though you would not believe it from the smell that comes off…)
1 tbsp sambal badjak — (this is a baked sambal with coconut - it’s lovely and milder than the more regularly used sambal oelek. Our jar lasted maybe a week :-))
2 tsp kentjoer —  (I must admit… this one still baffles me. Kentjoer is a ground root wich is supposed to have a very ginger-like taste. We went out of our way to buy some, but the ginger-like taste I do not get, in my opinion it has a more sour taste than the spicy note ginger has. I’d say: leave it out if you can’t get it or substitute for ginger powder)
3 tbsp sugar
50 gr dessicated coconut
75 ml coconut milk
half a lettuce (iceberg lettuce)
100 gr green beans
half a cucumber, washed

Method

1.  Rub the garlic, trassi, sambal, kentjoer, sugar and 1/4 tsp of salt together using a pestle and mortar. Add the dessicated coconut and coconut milk and rub it together with the spices until everything is well combined and forms a smooth paste. 

2. Take one big lettuce leaf for each diner to serve the salad in.  Shred the lettuce, clean the beans and boil them for 7-9 minutes, or wok them for a few minutes to your liking. Pour cold water over them and drain the water. Slice the cucumber in slices and slice those in half. 

3. Mix all the vegetables with the coconut dressing and serve on the salad leaves.  

This salad is lovely and fresh and has a mild spicy taste. Make sure the beans are still quite crunchy, that makes the dish so much better!

Daging Ketjap
Serves 4

Ingredients
4 tbsp sunflower oil
2 onions, finely sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
400 gr fillet of lamb, cubed
100 ml ketjap manis (sweet soy sauce)
the juice of 1 lemon

Method
1. Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the onion and garlic until they are soft. Add the meat and fry until browned on a slightly higher heat.

2. Add Ketjap manis, lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste and leave it to simmer for 45 minutes. 

Tandoori lambchops with bombay potatoes

One of my missions is to get my boyfriend to eat more vegetables. I’ll try everything that might secretly make him eat some. Today I decided not to disguise them. My boyfriend likes spicy food so I thought: Indian food will do the trick! My parents in law gave us some incredible lambchops (another one of his favourites) so they would accompany the veggies.

Tandoori lambchops with Bombay potatoes
Serves 4

Ingredients
2,5 tbsp tandoori spice paste
1 tbsp honey
2,5 tbsp yoghurt +extra to serve
12 lamb chops
700 gr small potatoes, quartered
60 ml sunflower oil
2 tsp black (or normal) mustardseed
2 tsp mild curry powder
1 tsp garam masala
2 tsp grated fresh root ginger
2 tomatoes, seeds removed, sliced in 8 parts
100 gr spinach
mangochutney (to serve)

Method

1. Mix the tandooripaste, honey and yoghurt, cover the lamchops with the mixture and coat well. Leave it in the marinade for 40 minutes to an hour. (Just follow the rest of the recipe and when you are done, you can start frying them - or prepare the marinade beforehand and leave them in the marinade a bit longer - it only enhances the taste!)

2. Boil the potatoes (sliced in quarters) in boiling salted water for 10 minutes or until soft.

3. Heat 40 ml of oil in a wok or frying pan on middle heat, add the mustardseeds and stir fry for 1 minute or until they start jumping from the pan. Add the currypowder, garam masala, ginger and potatoes and stir fry for 2-3 minutes until the potatoes are crispy.

4. Add the spinach and tomato and stir fry for another 2-3 minutes until the spinach has wilted. Keep warm.

5. Heat the remainder of the oil in your frying pan and heat on middle high heat. Fry the lam chops for 2 minutes on each side until they are slightly charred and cooked, but still pink in the middle (NOTE: this leaves a mess in your frying pan! We will cook our chops in the oven or under the grill next time - a barbecue is of course even better, but it’s wintertime already ;-)).

6. Serve the lamb chops with the Bombay potatoes, mangochutney and some extra yoghurt. Enjoy!

ETA: the spinach was pushing it a bit - as I already was afraid of. He did like the tomato (shock!) and potato but did not like the spinach. A shame as I thought the combination was delicious.