Cookbook Survivor: The Resolution (Confusion Edition)
I honestly don’t know quite what to think. Like I said, this is going to be a multi-week engagement, so no rush to judgment here.
I cannot sort the distinctions between my errors in judgment and execution and the book’s possibly suboptimal instructions. I think I’m mostly the screw-up?
Part of the issue was that I picked four things that I wanted on the plate that turned out to have the same preparation clock. So I was trying to handle four dishes with the same fifteen-minute finalization. Always a bad idea. (The naan, dear readers, went by the wayside due to time, but just as well—in my next engagement with the book, I want to try a bread that I don’t normally make anyway.)
The tikka masala wasn’t as smooth or creamy as it often is, but I think maybe that’s because I went straight from murgh to masala, so to speak—I grilled the marinated chicken tonight and then quickly dumped it into the already-cooking tikka masala sauce. Tasted great, texturally not very tikka masala-like. On me!
The potatoes? Those were the star. They were really good, really simple, and really tasty. And that’s what Batra highlights as her own recipe, aimed at celebrations of Navrati (no grains). I would eat a ton of these, any time.
The spinach? Tasted good, too thin. Here I stuck to Batra’s amounts and procedure pretty tightly, so maybe that’s on the cookbook.
The okra? Great idea. Needs to be the last thing you do before service, otherwise it gets really limp before eating.
Basically? A great meal.