RECIPE: Potato and Cauliflower Curry

Hello!

Welcome to my recipe post for a potato and cauliflower curry. I'll always tell you where I sourced the original recipe from and explain any changes I have made to it. And then obviously I can then call it my own hehehe (gotta love plagiarism.)

This was a recipe I found online from Olive Magazine here, stating it serves 2-3 but I added something to it and almost double the potatoes, to make it serve 4. It further states it took 40 minutes – now I didn't time mine but I personally think it took longer than that, or rather, it SHOULD take longer than that.

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Ingredients:

450g of peeled and chopped into little squares, potato. I used white and sweet, and about 750g

½ peeled and chopped large white onion

3 cloves of garlic, or more to your taste

4cm piece of ginger, peeled and chopped finely

Oil – the recipe says “groundnut”, but I used extra virgin olive oil

1 cauliflower, broken up into small florets

1 tsp of cumin seeds (I didn't have any at the time so I substituted for 1tsp extra of ground cumin)

1 large tsp of ground coriander

½ tsp of ground cumin

1 tsp of tumeric

¾ tsp cayenne pepper

3 seeded and chopped green chillies

3 large chopped tomatoes

OPTIONAL tinned chopped tomatoes with herbs

Method: now, this is available on the the Olive Mags website, and if you like really hard cauliflower, then do it their way. If like me, you HATE hard cauliflower then do it this way.

1. Put your chopped potatoes into some water and boil them until they are tender. Not like mashable tender, but not solid, solid. At the same time, either boil or start steaming your cauliflower. I have a tiered steamer so I steamed mine at the same time as boiling the potatoes.
2. Whilst that boils away, in a measuring jug put in about 20ml of water, the garlic, onion, ginger and if you don't have cumin seeds, add your extra ground cumin now. With a hand blender, whiz it all up into a mushy paste. Or in a food processor, which ever. If you find the mixture is not very mushy, then add more water. It needs to be a bit sloppy.
3. If your potatoes are now done, either using a heavy pan on high, or a frying pan on medium, put some of your oil in the pan and heat it up. Drain the potatoes and start frying them until they are golden brown. Keep steaming that cauliflower until its the texture you like. Once the potatoes are golden crispy all over, take them off the heat and put them to one side.
4. Do exactly the same to the cauliflower once it's at the texture you can live with. Dirty hard cauliflower. Set it aside with the potatoes.
5. Now if you had cumin seeds and didn't add ground cumin to your paste, add the seeds now to the pan and cook for 30 seconds or so. Now add your paste and cook for another 4-5 minutes.
6. Add all your spices and chillies, add your tomatoes and cook for 2 more minutes.
7. Time to add your potatoes and cauliflower, and if you are doing it my extras way, add in your tinned chopped tomatoes. Add to this 500ml of cold water. The original recipe states to cook for 4 more minutes for me, this was no where near long enough. Personally, I will say simply cook for however long it takes for the 500ml of water you added to become a nice thick sauce. I even added cornflour, so that's an optional extra too.

And there you go! I added salt and pepper to taste. I also added some fresh coriander to some natural plain yoghurt as a sort of dip. On the side I had some poppodoms accompanied by some absolutely stunning papaya and mango chutney from Aldi, HIGHLY recommended. And some jasmine rice.

Overall Score:

4/10.

Served with jasmine rice

I will eat my left overs which I have frozen because I hate waste, but honestly this wasn't for me. Without the added chopped tomatoes, the curry was just lacking flavour. And even with them in, the texture just wasn't right for me. The cauliflower was so hard because I followed Olive's recipe to the letter. If I were to cook this again, I would follow my advice up there and steam the cauli for much much longer, or even boil it. I think boiled and mashed would have actually been better as it would have made a silkier addition to the sauce.

Maybe next time! Let me know if you cook it and what you would recommend, or even if you enjoyed it as it is!

Speak soon,

Bear