The second meal I cooked alone included fajeto (soup?) and vagharela bhaat (rice). I cooked the fajeto first; it got late and my kitchen is tiny, so I ended up making the bhaat the next day.
*** Fajeto ***
I love how this recipe site gives step by step instructions with photos. It's so helpful!
This is a mango / yogurt dish. The recipe says it's best to make when mangos are ripe; well, mangos don't grow in Seattle, but I can get decent (... decent, not good, passable, I guess) frozen mango. I ended up straining out a lot of tough mango chunks because I didn't use pulp or puree (I tried to mash them a bit before putting in the pot...).
For the yogurt, I just picked up a 2c jar of sheep's milk yogurt at the farmer's market and let it sit on my counter a few hours before using (as the recipe suggests). I finally cleaned out the jar so I have to remember to return it on Sunday...
Neither my or my partner had experience cooking with more authentic Indian ingredients. I think he mostly just used whatever we had in the pantry. But I decided to stock my pantry with more authentic ingredients (e.g., actual red chili powder rather than the kind you'd get at a typical grocer). I used Desi Basket to order a bunch of dry goods. It was great! It's just incomparable to how expensive grocery store spices are. The whole order was like $80 and I got multiple pounds of pulses, flours, rice; I probably got like 1600g of various spices. There was only one fatality when it was shipped; the mustard seeds had leaked a bit. Also, unsurprisingly mostly everything comes in plastic bags rather than glass jars, so you have to have your own storage. That's fine with me though; I planned ahead :)
I don't have a mortar and pestle yet so I couldn't really paste-ify the ginger. Oh well, I think what I did still worked (chop it up really finely and then strain it at the end).
My major complaint when cooking (not about the recipe) is that I have a crappy electric stovetop now that's very small. It took probably *half an hour* for the fajeto to start simmering after I started it.
Tadka / tempering was also new to me. I found it quite fun!
*** Vagharela bhaat ***
This is a spiced rice that seems to usually be made with leftover rice but I decided to use fresh rice.
I was really impressed with my rice cooker's basmati! I just set it on "mixed" setting to cook. It was so fresh and fragrant when done.
I didn't use any cilantro. I'm hoping to figure out if I actually have the cilantro soap gene sometime soon. If I do, maybe I'll just swap it out for culantro in the future.
The only annoying thing about this recipe (and this was true of the ulam rice too) is that mixing rice in takes a while and it gets kind of chunky.
Verdict: This was a lovely meal! I will say, I didn't adjust the recipes at all, and to my unaccustomed palate the fajeto was quite spicy. The rice helped with that a bit, but it is also relatively spicy. I probably should have had yogurt on the side like the bhaat recipe suggested.
The rice has a wonderful toasted taste to it. I also really like the mustard seeds in it.
Both dishes reheated really well.
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