Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries: Week Nine: Palak Gosht

[dorchadas]

When schoolpsychnerd first told me that this week's curry was lamb with spinach, I was a bit worried. Not because I thought I wouldn't like it--as I said in last week's curry post, I love green vegetables and everything to do with them--but rather because I thought it might be too much like last week's curry. I don't have a problem with eating the same thing week in, week out, and I've eaten the same thing for breakfast and lunch for years now, but the entire point of Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries is to shake up my culinary repertoire and find some new tastes that we can mix in to our usually monotonous curry night. I already said that aachar gosht tasted like paneer last week, and this week was palak gosht, and since palak paneer is one of my favorite dishes at Indian restaurants, well...

Quick aside--paneer refers to the cheese, palak to the spinach, and gosht to red meat. We had beef again this week instead of the lamb that the recipe calls for. The local butcher actually had stew lamb, but we didn't see it until it was too late.

Yep, that's a whole bag of spinach. All of it got used.

Apparently I needn't have worried, because this week's curry didn't taste anything like last week's. It might have been the way the yogurt was mixed in last week...except that the meat was marinated in yogurt and the whole mixture was dumped in with the onions (photo of frying onions not included this week. If that bothers you, see every other week for your fix) and peppers. It might have been the butter that was added to the finished mix, which gave it a creamy texture as opposed to the slightly chopped-vegetable-chunky texture of aachar gosht. It might just have been that this week's curry was based on spinach, except palak paneer is spinach and cheese. I'm not sure why last week reminded me of it and this week didn't, but that's actually a good thing.

Like I said last week, I considering paneer to be a side dish and not a meal, even when there's meat in it, so I was slightly prejudiced against aachar gosht from the get-go. That wasn't true this week, and I think that's part of why I loved palak gosht so much.

Beef marinating in yogurt. Sometimes, I think all beef should be marinating in yogurt.

Words from the Chef

I've rhapsodized before about my love of green curries. I've never met a vegetable I didn't like and it's been hard for me to not have a curry filled with vegetables. But tons of pureed spinach and tomatoes? Yes! This curry was fairly straight forward and easy to make. It didn't take tons of time but still tasted great. I can imagine it would taste even better if I had given it the full hour to marinate. It had a pleasant heat and a really flavorful gravy. I cut down on the amount of water and I think that really helped. It's a fairly watery curry already so adding more water would have drowned out the flavor. I would eat leftovers of this curry with a smile on my face!

Vegetables! Yay!

As the talented and lovely schoolpsychnerd says, this curry also solves an issue I've had with a lot of the curries we've been eating up until now. Thai curry is usually full of a lot of vegetables, and most of the Indian curries we've been making from this book have onions, peppers, and...not much else, which is why I'm almost always complaining about the lack of veggies and why we usually have a side-dish of vegetables to go with it, whereas with Thai curry it was just the curry and a side bowl of rice.

We still had a bowl of zucchini with this, but not because it was necessary. Instead, it was because we got a ton of zucchini in our CSA and needed to eat it. The curry had an entire bag of spinach, onions, tomatos, garlic, ginger...there were enough vegetables that I had the same feeling I did when I ate Thai curry. Couple that with the fact that it tasted delicious, and I'd love to have this again.

That butter is there because the recipe recommends it. That's our excuse and we're sticking to it.

Palak gosht was simply excellent, and unlike korma pulao it doesn't take schoolpsychnerd hours and hours of work to make. The only reason I didn't go back for seconds and stuff myself full of tasty curry is because I was already stuffed full from the harissa potatos and zucchini and yogurt and cheddar cheese (I eat a lot...) that I had alongside it. I'm already looking forward to Wednesday, when I get to have it for leftovers after it's been marinating in itself for hours and hours. Unqualified success all around!

Would I Eat It Again?: Absolutely.
Do I Prefer It to the Usual Thai Curry?: I think I might. I wouldn't mind eating this week after week at all.
What Would I Change?: I just have to repeat last week: nothing. Palak gosht is great.

Comments

[kraada.livejournal.com]

So, this was our first foray into the curries from this book. However, due to poor planning and ridiculous quantities of snow we had no tomatoes on hand, so did without. Also we used coconut milk yogurt instead of actual yogurt (again, as it's what we had). And we also did beef (again, because...)

Obviously I cannot compare to the proper recipe, but what we did eat was delicious. We ended up cutting down some on the water as well as the coconut milk yogurt never quite absorbed like it was supposed to. We may try with a "greek style" coconut milk yogurt at a later date. Either way we'll certainly have it again!

[dorchadas]

softlykarou is often worried about sauces getting too liquidy too. I like more soup-like curries, she likes dry curries, and it's always a tension between us.

Though now I want to try this with coconut milk yogurt. I never even though of doing that, and I love coconut so much that now it seems like a fantastic idea!