No, this isn’t traditional. At least, I don’t believe it is a traditional Indian dish. It’s possible that I hit upon a cooking method and ingredient list that is used in some of the South Indian states as a traditional dish by sheer luck, in which case, if there’s a real name for this, please, someone let me know.

Basically, I put this dish together to go with the Lamb Patties With Incendiary Green Chutney out of the vegetables from our garden and the other ingredients I had from the farmer’s market and laying about in the pantry.

This was meant to be a side dish, but if you wanted it to be the centerpiece of your dinner plate, you could add either tofu or paneer cheese and serve it with rice, spelt or wheat berry pilau or bread for a complete meal. You’d just pre-fry the tofu or cheese, then drain it on paper towels and then add it back to the pan at the same time you add the green beans so it has a chance to soak up the flavors from the pan without becoming overly brown.

I was inspired to make this because my curry plant is finally large enough to harvest bits and pieces, and I really wanted to use the musky-scented leaves in some sort of vegetable dish. I had green beans, a sweet bell pepper, garlic and carrots from our garden, as well as one purple onion from the market. Cumin seeds and mustard seeds go beautifully with curry leaves, so out of the cabinet they came.

Since the lamb patties are dry–though they are served with a green chutney and yogurt that acts as a sauce, I decided to add a little coconut milk to the pan to make a small amount of thick, clinging sauce which I colored with a scant bit of turmeric and smoked paprika. The paprika adds a subtle smoky flavor as well as color–I’ve found that it gives Indian food just a little bit more of a depth than plain paprika does.

Anyway, this is simple to make and tastes lovely. Zak, Kat and I gobbled it down gleefully–the vegetables retain their color and crunch, while still absorbing lots of the scents and savors of the spices. The coconut milk binds it all together and adds just enough moisture to keep the vegetables both crisp and juicy.

Well worth the time it took to think out and make, and is a good quick side dish or main dish to add to your repertoire.

South Indian Style Vegetable Saute
Ingredients:

1 tablespoon coconut oil or peanut oil
1 medium red onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon whole mustard seeds
10 curry leaves
1 small red bell pepper, seeded and cut julienne
3 carrots, peeled and cut julienne
8-12 ounces green beans, washed, topped and tailed and blanched then drained
1/2 cup coconut milk, divided
1/8 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/8 teaspoon smoked paprika (or regular paprika)
salt to taste

Method:

Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium high heat. Add the onion, sprinkle with salt and cook until the onion is turning golden. Add the garlic, cumin seeds and mustard seeds, then the curry leaves. Cook, stirring, until the garlic takes on a golden color and the onions are darker gold. Add the pepper and carrot, and cook, stirring, for several minutes, until the carrots start to become tender and take on color.

Add the green beans, and cook, stirring until the onions are well browned and the vegetables have nice brown spots in places. add half of the coconut milk, add the turmeric and paprika, and stir to combine. Cook down until the coconut milk virtually disappears and the vegetables are tender. Add the rest of the coconut milk, stir and cook for one more minute.

Add salt to taste and serve immediately.

Makes enough for three adults and one child.

Indian food has an unfortunate reputation of being both time consuming and difficult.

This is not necessarily true.

Yes, there are curries out there that should properly be cooked down for hours and hours on low heat, curries which involve multiple spice pastes ground to just the correct texture and added at just the right times. The holiday, festival and banquet foods of India -are- indeed complex and involve a great deal of preparation and work to make properly.

But you know that everyone in India doesn’t eat or cook those dishes every day.

AND, I hope you also know that everything that is cooked and eaten in India isn’t a curry, with lots of sauce, right? You know that by now, surely.

What I’m getting at is that there are plenty of fairly simple, straightforward homestyle dishes cooked in India, and they are just as delicious and easy when cooked for our families here in the United States.

And this is one of those dishes.

These lamb patties are a riff off of several Madhur Jaffrey recipes and others I’ve used over the years. I’ve cooked those recipes often enough that I just sort of make up my own version off the top of my head, spicing the patties however I feel like on that particular day. These patties are simplicity itself to make–thy just require ground lamb, fresh garlic, ginger, scallions or shallots, fresh mint, spices and a wee bit of yogurt. They are mixed together and then pan fried in the tiniest amount of oil possible, because the rich lamb has enough fat to almost keep the patties from sticking to the pan.

Traditionally, when serving a non-sauced or dry dish in most Indian households, a wet salad, raita or chutney is served with it. For these patties, I chose to do a variation on my more traditional Green Chutney recipe. In this version, I used more cilantro, less mint and added Thai basil to the herbs. I used one large garlic clove, and plenty of fresh ginger, lime zest, lime juice and five red Thai chilies from my garden.

Let me tell you about these chilies.

They are beastly hot. I think it was because of our drought in June, but they are swelteringly, tongue-blisteringly hot this year. And I used five of them, because the seasonings in the lamb are so soft and gentle, that I really wanted the chutney to light a fire in the mouth. You can use as many or as few as you like, but use red ones, because the flecks of red look really pretty in the velvety green chutney.

For cooling the arson I committed with the chuntey, I also served the patties with a drizzle of my own homemade Greek yogurt. (Yes, you will eventually get a recipe for that–but I’m still tinkering about with it. Be patient!)

The texture of the patties is meltingly tender–especially if you are careful when you mix in the seasonings not to knead the meat too harshly. When you form the patties, be gentle and don’t compact the meat too tightly, just gently pat it into shape to get the proper tenderness. Also, make certain to let a crust form on the bottom of the patties before trying to flip them. That way they’ll have a lightly crisped outside and that soft melt-in-the-mouth inside, AND they won’t fall apart when you flip them.

This is an easy Indian main dish–I had it cooked and table ready in a mere 45 minutes, though I could have managed 30 minutes if I’d rushed at it.

Fast enough for a weekday dinner…and bursting with flavor, texture and color.

Lamb Patties With Incendiary Green Chutney
Ingredients:

1/2 teaspoon cumin seed
1/2 teaspoon coriander seed
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed
1/2 teaspoon cardamom seed
1 whole clove
5 peppercorns
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/8 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 pound ground lamb
1 teaspoon yogurt
1″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and cut into chunks
2 large cloves garlic, peeled
2 scallions, white and light green parts only
7 large fresh spearmint leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
scant amount of oil to pan fry
1/2 cup packed cilantro leaves
1/4 cup packed Thai basil leaves
1/4 cup packed spearmint leaves
dark green tops of one scallion
zest of 1/2 lime
5 red Thai chilies
juice of 2 limes
salt to taste

Method:

Toast the first six ingredients lightly over medium heat in a heavy bottomed skillet. When browned and fragrant, pour into a spice grinder and grind to a powder. Mix with the rest of the ingredients up to but not including the scant oil to pan fry, kneading the meat mixture gently with your hands. Do not knead roughly.

Gently form into round patties about three inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick.

Set aside for a few minutes while you prepare the chutney.

Take all the rest of the ingredients up to but not including the lime juice and grind thoroughly in a food grinder. Put red-flecked green paste in a bowl and stir in lime juice. Salt to taste.

In a wide, heavy bottomed skillet, heat a small amount of canola oil over medium heat. When the pan is smoking hot, add the patties, and leave them in position for at least two minutes, or until a crust forms on the bottom, and the patties are easily picked up with a spatula and flipped. Cook for eight minutes, or until the other side is browned and somewhat crisp and the inside is a pale pink and very tender.

When patties are done, serve them atop rice, drizzled with yogurt and topped with some the Incendiary Green Chutney.

Eat it and weep tears of joy and pain from the chutney’s relentless firepower. (Or at least, eat it and your nose will run!)

Now see, that wasn’t so hard, was it? And it was mighty good too–admit it.

Good enough to make again, I’ll wager.

In my last post, I described my general love of all things eggplant and gave a recipe for a Chinese way of cooking them.

In my litany of international ways with eggplant with which I am not only familiar but also adore, I left out one very important subcontinent: India.

That’s because I wanted to write a post specifically about Indian ways with eggplant, also known as brinjal.

In India, eggplant can be stuffed and baked, stuffed and simmered, fried, roasted and mashed, and, of course, cooked into a myriad of curries, from the dry to the saucy, with sauces based on tomatoes, onions, coconut milk, ground up nuts or yogurt.

I believe the creative culinarians of India have simply come up with more ways to cook eggplant than just about anyone else in the world. Well, maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration–but I don’t much care, because the simple truth is this–every Indian eggplant recipe I’ve tried, I’ve adored. There isn’t a single one I’ve tried that I’ve not liked. Not one. In my experience, each one is tastier than the last, or at least as tasty as the last and they are all just SO amazing.

It’s because eggplant is a flavor sponge that Indian spices just make them taste so amazing. What is really amazing is how well the eggplants soak up the spices without losing their own sweet or lightly bitter flavor. And, as always, eggplant has that rich, silky texture that makes it especially filling and satisfying without being heavy.

This particular recipe is a traditional Hyderabadi way of cooking tiny baby eggplants–like the ones I picked from the plants on my deck.

I tasted this dish just this week, on Tuesday, at Reethika’s lunch buffet. Cute whole baby eggplants were split into quarters without being cut completely apart and simmered in a rich, warm brown curry sauce redolent with spices in the foreground, and deep in the background was an addictive nutty sweetness redolent of well, it tasted sort of like peanuts, but not exactly. I thought it might have been peanuts mixed with toasted round urad dal or perhaps chana dalia, but I couldn’t be sure.

When I got home and started researching the recipe, I discovered that I was right about the peanuts, but the other nut flavor I caught was toasted sesame seeds. AHA! That’s why it didn’t taste exactly peanut like–but had another nut flavor mixed in as well. The other main flavoring was ground toasted unsweetened coconut.

Knowing I had plenty of baby eggplants to be used this weekend, I decided to try my hand at this delicious, unique curry. Of course, by the time I started cooking dinner on Saturday, I realized that some very important ingredients I usually had in my pantry were missing. But, more on that later.

When I picked my baby eggplants–some of them turned out to be too big to be really counted as babies. So, instead of just slitting the eggplants into quarters, I actually cut them into chunks. These I browned in peanut oil until they were just starting to soften and were maybe about half-cooked through. I set the eggplant aside, and browned a red onion cut into a medium dice in the same pan.

Back to those important ingredients that turned up missing.

I almost always have dry roasted unsalted peanuts in my pantry, as well as white sesame seeds and unsweetened shredded coconut.

However, once I picked my eggplants and had a severe craving for this peanut-sesame sauce, I discovered that Zak had eaten the peanuts, the sesame seeds had been borrowed by Morganna and the coconut had fallen into a hole in the space-time continuum and had ended up in another universe entirely.

Normal people would just make a different eggplant curry, but not I. My tastebuds were set for the peanut sauce and the peanut sauce I would have. I thought of going out the Asian market to pick up the peanuts, sesame seeds and coconut, but by the time I was cooking, the store was already closed.

So, I set to thinking.

While I lacked peanuts, I did have natural peanut butter, which is nothing more than peanuts ground up with a little bit of extra peanut oil and a touch of salt. And though my pantry was sans sesame seeds, I did have a jar of tahini, which is nothing more than ground up toasted sesame seeds. And though there was no coconut, I did have some coconut milk, which while it isn’t made from ground up coconut directly–it is made of ground coconut steeped in hot water until the flavor and fat is extracted.

I made the command decision to use these substitutions, to see if I could make a credible alternative to the traditional recipe.

I have to say that while I felt guilty for bastardizing the recipe, and I fully intend to make a more traditional version of it the next time I get my hands on baby eggplant, eating the dish cooked this way was fully as satisfying as eating it made the proper way. The only difference I could detect was that my version was a little smoother, and the sauce was a bit more rich, I think from using the coconut milk instead of ground coconut.

Other than that, even with the substitutions, mine was a credible version of a classic dish that is going to become a regular way to cook eggplant in my kitchen, and is worth knowing, especially for folks who don’t own a grinder that is up to the task of grinding peanuts, sesame seeds and coconut into a smooth paste.

Hyderabadi Bagara Baigan
Ingredients:

2 tablespoons peanut oil (cold pressed, unrefined tastes amazing here)
1 pound very small (golf ball sized) baby eggplant
1 medium red onion, diced medium (about 3/4 cup diced)
1 1/2″ cube ginger, peeled and minced very finely (or pureed)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced very finely (or pureed)
1 1/2 tablespoons natural peanut butter
1 tablespoon tahini
2 tablespoons coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
ground cayenne chili to taste
1 1/2 teaspoons tamarind concentrate
1 1/2 cups water (or more as needed)
salt to taste
roughly chopped cilantro as garnish

Method:

Cut the stem off of the baby eggplants carefully, peeling it away and leaving the fruits mostly whole. Cut an “X” from the rounded end (opposite the stem end) almost, but not quite through the fruit, nearly cutting it into quarters. (If your eggplants are bigger than golf ball sized, go ahead and cut them into quarters)

Heat the peanut oil in a shallow, heavy bottomed pan over high heat and cook the eggplants until they are soft, but still somewhat firm in the middle–not quite completely tender. Remove eggplant and set aside.

In the same pan, using the same oil, brown the onion, stirring, until it is a deep mahogany color. Add the ginger and garlic, then the peanut butter, tahini and coconut milk, and turn the heat down to medium and cook, stirring, until fragrant–about two minutes. Add the spices, and cook one more minute. Add the tamarind concentrate and water, and stir well to combine.

Simmer until the eggplants are fully tender and the sauce has thickened, adding water as needed to cook the eggplants all the way.

Add salt to taste, and sprinkle with cilantro as garnish.

This is great with chapati or rice, either one. It’s even better with both.

The very first chapati I ever had was not very good.

Mind you, it was made by an American friend whose cooking skills were less than impressive, from a recipe from an American vegetarian cookbook (one of the older ones where the recipes tended toward the “less-than-delicious vegetarian glop dishes” that used to be the norm way back in the day) by a cookbook author whom I am certain probably never tasted a well-made chapati in her life.

The first one I tasted I ate out of politeness, because it was a dry, cardboard-like affair that I could not imagine ANYONE in her right mind liking–much less an entire subcontinent of people not only liking it, but eating it often. I didn’t even get why anyone would call it a bread–it was more like a somewhat pliable cracker.

So that experience kept me from trying a proper chapati for years.

When I finally did try one, I had already fallen under the spell of naan, bhatura and pooris, so I was still somewhat skeptical of something as simply made as a griddle-baked flatbread being good.

But, the chapati I had made in the hands of a good cook was pretty good, so I could at least see why people liked them. However, compared to the glories that were naan, bhatura and poori–I didn’t find myself craving chapati.

Until I had a truly flakey, tender and delicious version, one that was subtly scented with spices and had an elusive nutty flavor that I soon recognized as coming not only from the usual whole wheat flour, but also some besan–toasted chickpea flour.

After tasting those chapati–I changed my mind about the formerly humble griddle baked flatbreads and decided I had to figure out how to make ones that tasted just like the ones at my favorite restaurant.

And so, I did.

My first task was to research recipes.

I looked online, but found no recipes that sounded exactly right, so I started digging through my three shelves of Indian cookbooks.

I found what I was looking for in one of oldest cookbooks–Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking, which is one of the cookbooks that taught me many of my first Indian recipes. Copyright 1980, this older book with very few illustrations and no photographs is truly a classic in the best sense of the word–and Sahni, the author, is not only very knowledgeable about Indian cookery, she is deftly able to put her knowledge onto paper in the form of step-by-step instructions easy enough for a beginner to follow without the benefit of illustrations.

What I found in Sahni’s tome is a recipe for “Besan ki Roti”, or chickpea flour flat bread. The spices she used in her recipe were not what I was aiming for, and the method she used for rolling out the dough would not result in as flaky a bread as I wanted (but I wasn’t worried about that as I had a pretty good idea as to how to make the breads flaky my own self–because I knew how to make flaky Chinese scallion pancakes, and was going to use the same technique here).

I also ended up adding a little bit of yogurt and ghee to the dough itself to tenderize it further–according to Sahni, the besan makes the dough stiffer and chewier than just using the usual durum atta flour that most cooks use to make chapati. Knowing well the tenderizing properties of fats and dairy products in bread dough, I decided to add some–and it turned out to be the correct decision.

Finally, instead of the usual method of cooking a chapati, which consists of baking for a few seconds on a flat, hot cast iron griddle, then passing it over on an open fire, I added a third technique–a short steaming (about 10-20 seconds) wrapped in a napkin in the microwave.

The result is a very flaky, tender, delicious chapati, just like the title of this post says. They are nutty, subtly scented with fenugreek and cumin and have a delicious nutty flavor and aroma, thanks to the small amount of besan. They taste perfect with any Indian dish–but I particularly like it with channa masala and safaid keema mattar.

The truth is, these chapati would be good with ANY Indian dishes. And even though my explanation of the technique is going to sound long, involved and difficult–it really isn’t. It takes longer to explain how to make these flatbreads than it does to make them. After I got the hang of it, I could cook a chapati, from pinching the bit of dough from the ball to rolling it out, rolling it up, rolling it out again, cooking it on the griddle, then over the fire, then in the microwave, in two minutes flat, give or take a second or two. One the rhythm is established, your hands will be able to go fast as lightning, and you will find yourself able to make a pile of these little breads for your friends and family in no time.

Flaky Chapati
Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat chapati flour or regular whole wheat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1/3 cup besan flour
1/4 teaspoon ground fenugreek seeds
1/8 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ghee
1 tablespoon Greek style yogurt
1 1/8 cup to 1 1/4 cuo warm water (start with smaller measure, use more as needed)
all purpose flour for rolling out
melted ghee for rolling out

Method:

Either the morning of the evening you want your chapati or the night before, mix together the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Oil your hands with a small amount of canola oil or ghee so the dough will not stick as you mix and stir the dough.

Stir in the ghee and yogurt with your fingers until mixture is crumbly, with a few little lumps like happens with a very shaggy pastry dough before you add the water. (Alternately, you can use a fork to mix in the ghee and yogurt, but I find it easier to just use my fingers to rub it in.)

Slowly stir in the water, mixing with your hand until the dough firms up enough to knead. Once the dough is firm, yet still slightly sticky, begin kneading with both hands until the dough is elastic and and smooth, yet still a bit tacky to the touch. (Not so sticky that it clings to your fingers, just not dry and silky like most yeast doughs are supposed to be after they are kneaded. It should just feel like it wants to grab onto your finger, but it doesn’t actually do it.)

Put the dough into a ziplock bag, and place in the fridge to rest for at least three hours, though, I like it best if I make the dough the night before and let it rest until lunch or dinnertime the next day. For whatever reason, the dough rested longer is much more pliable and soft when baked up than the fresher dough made just a few hours before and rested at room temperature.)

Remove the dough from the fridge about a half hour before you are ready to cook some chapati, then turn the dough out onto a flour-dusted surface, and knead it gently to warm it up and to dry up any surface moisture with the extra flour.

Now, there are two ways you can go about dividing the dough into little balls ready to be rolled into flatbreads. The way you are supposed to do it is to roll the dough in your hands into a big ball, then cut that in half. Set aside one piece of dough and seal it back up in the ziplock to keep it fresh and moist. The other piece of dough, you roll into a snake about 15 inches or so long and cut that into 12 equal pieces. Then you roll each of those pieces into a perfect ball and cover the ones you are not working with to keep them from drying out.

Or…you could be lazy like I got as I experimented with a couple of different batches of dough and just pull off a chunk of dough and roll it into a ball in your palms and call it good, while leaving the rest of the big dough ball covered. Having done it both ways, it works fine either way.

Then, you take your dough ball and flatten it into a disk between your palms. Make it look like a little UFO. Very cute, right? Then, you dust flour onto the rolling surface and set your disk down. Dust your rolling pin with flour and roll that disk out into as perfect a circle as you can manage, as thin as you can manage. Turn the dough a quarter turn between rollings if you want a perfect perfect circle, if you don’t care, just roll it out in different directions until you get a very thin (less than 1/8″ thick) roundish sheet of dough.

Brush with a little bit of melted ghee. Please do not go overboard with this. Just use a little bit. (In your head, or out loud, sing the backup singers’ part of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,”–”Just a little bit, just a little bit, just a little bit–sockittome,sockittome….” etc. This helps you remember to go easy on the ghee.)

Then…start rolling that flat bread dough disk into a cigar or another snake like shape with your fingers. It won’t want to do this easily–ignore it and endeavor to persevere, and you will end up with a cylinder of dough before you know it. Stretch that dough out by pulling at either end and then spiral it inward upon itself into a snail or rosette shape, making it a flat disk once again, but this time, with a spiral design on it. Pinch the end to and along the spiral to hold it together–just nip the edges together with your fingers.

Then, dust it and the rolling surface with flour, dust your rolling pin and roll it out flat again.

Now, that all sounds very hard, but really, it takes much longer to explain and write it down than it does just to do it. Trust me. If you want more explanations of the technique, read my recipe for Scallion Pancakes.

Set your pancake aside on a lightly flour dusted surface and roll out another one. While you are rolling out a second chapati, start heating up your griddle.

Now, in India, these are cooked on a flat, round cast iron griddle called a tava. Not having one of those, I used a heavy cast iron skillet. You could also use a cast iron griddle, or even a cast iron Dutch Oven if that’s all you have, but whatever you use, make it a heavy, well-seasoned cast iron pan. If you don’t have cast iron, you should–go out and get a cast iron skillet and season and treat it well and your cooking will improve vastly. They aren’t that expensive, and if you’re lucky, you can find an old, blackened, well seasoned one in a relatives cupboard, forgotten and unused, or you can get one at a yard sale.

Anyway, I digress. Put your cast iron cooking surface on the burner and turn the heat up to high. Let it heat. Then, turn on the burner next to or behind that pan and just let it go. If you don’t have gas–you can still do this with electric, but it won’t have that fire-cooked aroma. But it will still work, so long as you have your burners on high.

Now, you need two other cooking implements. A spatula for flipping the chapati over on the griddle or skillet surface, and a set of tongs for picking it up and holding it over the live fire or the naked electric burner. Have these ready to hand. Also have a plate with a cotton napkin (or a paper towel) on it big enough to fold over the chapati at the ready.

After you’ve rolled the second chapati, put the first one right onto the pre-heated cast iron cooking surface. Do not use grease, ghee or oil. Just the hot pan. In mere seconds it will cook on the first side. Flip it over with the spatula and you should see speckly brown spots on that side as pictured above at the beginning of the recipe. Leave it on the other side for a couple of seconds and then use the tongs to pick up the chapati and hold it over the flame or the hot naked burner. Flip it back and forth, this way and that, and watch in amazement as it finishes cooking and even puffs up in places. Isn’t that the coolest? It is.

After flipping it around over the fire for a few seconds–about ten or so total–don’t drop it in the fire and let it burn! After that, put it on the plate, fold the napkin over and microwave it on high for a mere 10-20 seconds. Remove, unwrap, brush one side with melted ghee and fold into quarters than put in a basket lined with a napkin and cover it up to keep it warm.

Continue cooking, then rolling and etcetera until you have enough chapati for a first serving for your family and friends. After that, turn off the burners and serve everything hot–it’s easiest to put the rice, curries and raitas and whatnot on the table first, have everyone fix their plates and sit down, then go and cook the chapati and bring them out all at once. If, after eating one chapati, folks want more, you can go and cook more, or teach them how to do it. You can roll, they can cook and everyone can be fat and happy.

That’s it. I promise that it sounds harder to do than it is–and the results are so worth the trouble of learning how to make these lovely little flatbreads that are nothing like the first unfortunate example I ate nearly twenty years ago in a friend’s kitchen.

“Carola” is one of my favorite all-time potato varieties.

Which might seem weird to some folks–I mean, a potato is a potato, right?

Well, no. At least when it comes to locally grown or home-grown potatoes, there are distinct flavor and texture differences between potato varieties.

The same can not always be said of supermarket potatoes. There are differences in texture and color, but I cannot say the same for flavor. Many supermarket potatoes seem to have no flavor whatsoever, which leads to the addition of copious amounts butter, sour cream and other flavor enhancers in an attempt to create flavor where none exists naturally.

I grew up eating “Kennebec” potatoes grown on my Grandpa’s farm, and to this day, they are my favorite potato for mashing. They have an earthy, nutty flavor and mash up creamy and fluffy, never starchy and sticky. I use a few garlic cloves boiled with the potatoes and then mashed with them to give a hint of sweetness to the mixture and then enhance it all with smaller amounts of butter and Greek yogurt than I usually use when I make mashed potatoes with random russets or reds from the grocery store.

But, I’m not talking about Kennebecs here–I’m talking Carolas, which I love even more than my old friend from Maine. Carola is a potato variety originally from Germany, and it is considered a “midseason” potato with an exceptionally creamy texture and a sweet, lightly nutty flavor that is amazing when parboiled and then sauteed.

The skins are thin and tender with an earthy, never bitter flaver, and the sunny yellow flesh not only carries other flavors with it, but always retains its nutty sweetness whether roasted, fried or boiled.

My favorite method of cooking these potatoes, especially when they are tiny babies (about 1″ round) is to parboil them whole and when they are fork tender, drain and dry them, then saute them in butter with minced fresh German Extra-Hardy garlic and perhaps some fresh rosemary or thyme leaves. Salted and lightly peppered, these wee potatoes are a highly anticipated late spring and summer treat at our table.

When the Carolas grow a bit larger, I still cook them by the same method, but instead of sauteeing them whole, I cut them into quarters after parboiling and draining them. This keeps the flesh from absorbing too much water, and improves the texture of the potato mightily.

I also roast the larger potatoes in a hot oven by tossing the quartered pieces with olive oil, salt and Aleppo chili pepper flakes, then cooking them until crisp and brown. Sometimes I sprinkle the potatoes with fresh minced garlic and rosemary during the last five to ten minutes of cooking, but not always. Sometimes, plain potatoes are just plain old spectacular without adornment.

But, sometimes, even a potato as fantastic as the Carola wants a bit of gussying-up, so last night, I decided to take my usual parboiling and sauteeing method a step further and give it a zing of flavor from the Indian subcontinent.

The recipe is still very simple and the flavors are clean and fresh, with a musky, earthy depth provided by the fresh curry leaves and cumin and mustard seeds, and a richness from the crispy browned garlic and ginger.

Give this technique a try–and if you can find Carolas at your farmer’s market, please use them for this recipe. (I am also told that Carola potatoes make great potato salad, but I cannot speak to the veracity of that statement myself, having never tried it. But, I suspect it to be true–if any readers have ever used them in a potato salad, please let me know how they worked.)

Indian Style Carola Potatoes
Ingredients:

1 pound young Carola potatoes, well scrubbed
2 tablespoons ghee or butter
10 fresh or frozen curry leaves
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2″ piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
salt to taste
Aleppo chili pepper flakes to taste

Method:

Put the potatoes into a deep saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring a boil and cook until fork tender. Drain and dry the potatoes well. If the potatoes are larger than about 3/4″ in diameter, quarter them.

Melt the ghee or butter in a deep saute pan over medium heat. Add the curry leaves, and cook until they are fragrant–about a minute. Add the garlic, ginger and spice seeds, and cook, stirring constantly, until the garlic and ginger are fragrant, but not at all browned–about a minute.

Add the potatoes and cook, stirring and tossing, until the mustard seeds sizzle and pop and the garlic and ginger turn golden, and the potato skins crisp up a bit. This takes about five minutes of constantly moving the potatoes around in the skillet–I both stir and toss, but one or the other works just fine as well.

Add salt and Aleppo pepper flakes to taste and serve hot. These are good with grilled meats or as part of a vegetarian meal with Channa bhatura or Mixed Mushrooms and Greens Dal.