Week 51 - South Indian

I was thrilled when I saw that the Week 51 theme was South Indian, because as a family, we love South Indian cuisine. I was also a little intimidated though, because some of those recipes are a lot of work! Making dosas can take hours sometimes. In the end, I decided on rava dosa (adapted from a recipe on Indian Healthy Recipes) with some aloo masala from the same site. Did I pick rava dosa because it looked doable and wasn't an hours-long process? Maybe...

The first step was making the batter out of semolina, rice flour, all-purpose flour, salt, cumin seeds, black pepper, finely chopped onion, finely chopped curry leaves, finely chopped cilantro leaves, and ginger, with enough water to make it runny. The batter only needed to rest for 20 minutes before cooking, which was great. I had never bought fresh curry leaves before, but I made a special trip for them so I could make this (and some other Indian dishes), and I think I'm going to need them whenever I make South Indian food in the future. There really is just no comparable ingredient (that I know of).

The recipe instructions said to start with a hot pan, and to add just a few drops of oil and grease it with a sliced onion. I feel like I've seen them do something similar at restaurants, but had never tried it at home. Wow, that was a revelation. I used so little oil to make each one of these dosa, but they came off the pan so easily thanks to this onion trick!

The batter gets poured into the pan starting from the edges and then filling in the gaps. That reminded me of banh xeo, and it hadn't occurred to me before making this that they are both thin, crispy pancakes, so why wouldn't they be made similarly? The dosa toasts on low until the edges come off the pan and it's cooked through. I did flip them to finish cooking them, but might not be necessary. The one thing I didn't plan on was that each dosa takes a long time to cook (again, I wish I had thought of the banh xeo connection earlier, because it's the same thing there), like maybe even 10 minutes type of long. For multiple dosa, I hadn't budgeted in that type of time, and it made for a very late, kind of stressful dinner rush. The dosa were excellent though, and I would make them again. I would just budget more time than I did for them.

I followed the aloo masala recipe fairly closely, other than leaving out the chilies because of little B, and they were delicious. Not sure what more to say here about well-seasoned mashed potatoes, but I would make this again too.

With all the work going into the dosa and the potatoes, I didn't make any of the other sides that you normally get with dosa at restaurants, but I just didn't have the capacity to. Maybe next time, I'll buy some pre-made chutneys at the store when I get the curry leaves for a more full experience, but we were still really satisfied with this!