Cauliflower and Chickpea Curry
Since befriending the Bhutanese refugees in our neighborhood over a year ago, our tolerance for spice has gone up quite a bit. These folks can cook. I’ve eaten some of the best food in their homes. And I am so grateful that they are not shy about teaching me their tricks!
This one is my own creation, loosely based on what I fondly call “Rewata’s Curry”, simply because a darling girl named Rewata taught me how to make it. I know, I’m clever that way.
For this concoction, I started off with an onion (red, fresh from the CSA today!), and some peppers from our garden. For this batch I used 5 peppers; typically I’ll use 6 or 7 little birds-eye chilies I get at this little Asian market called Mekong (I just love the little old lady that runs it), but I wanted to use the goods from our garden today. I heated up a generous portion of olive oil in a pan and let the onion and peppers sauté in that for a bit. I usually like to use grapeseed oil for this dish, just because it has a higher smoking point and a more neutral flavor, but olive was all I had. I added in a good dose of turmeric (I’ve since realized the error of my earlier assumption. I really disliked those samosas I made, and I just assumed it was the turmeric. I was wrong. I have no idea what made them nasty. And I no longer measure spices when cooking. Go figure.) and plenty of salt, and also snuck in a little “muchi hot curry powder” that I bought in bulk. Let it rest and heat and stew for a bit…
I got to work chopping up that lovely head of cauliflower and got out a bowl of chickpeas I had boiled the night before. I’ve discovered my aversion to beans and chickpeas is probably because I’ve mostly had them canned. I’ve been buying them dried in bulk and cooking them myself and find that I love them so much more. So in went the pile of chickpeas and in went the pile of chopped up bits of cauliflower. I was a little distracted by how much the stalk of the cauliflower looked like vertebrae to me, but you know…
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble till everything is tender and spicy and lots of adding in more salt, scraping the caramelized little bits of goodness from the bottom of the pan, tasting for more chilies, throwing in a good 4-5 cloves of pressed garlic (oops! forgot it!) and finally covering and letting it simmer and soften for a bit. I put a pot of basmati rice on to boil and Cute Boy and I picked a load of cherry tomatoes from our garden to serve with the curry. (Pictured behind the cherry tomatoes are romas, also picked from our garden this evening. Our tomatoes are producing faster than we can keep up with them!) We notice that the Bhutanese families often serve fresh fruit with the meals, it offsets the heat and salt nicely. The cherry tomatoes were a perfect accompaniment.
At the last minute we decided to call over a couple of our friends to share our meal with us; after all, what goes better with curry than some of the friends who inspired you to cook Bhutanese-style in the first place? Bhakta and Sha shared our meal with us, and while the spice level was pretty decent for us, we asked what they thought… the answer was a polite, “Yes, it is a little bit hot.”
We’ll get there someday, friends. We’ll get there.
