There’s this Indian restaurant that delivers to our house. If it didn’t cost a bajillionty dollars to order from them, I’d probably eat Indian food every night. But it does, and also their food (like most restaurants’) is very high in sodium and fat. As part of my ongoing attempt to reproduce ethnic foods at home, I tried to make korma the other night. Afterwards, I looked up what korma actually is. It is not the same thing as the thing I made. But what I made was tasty and healthful, so I’m going to be making it again. And I’m not going to call it, “That stuff that I made that shared nothing with real Korma except the name and a couple spices.” So, yes, I know I’m not actually providing you with an authentic Korma recipe. I’m calling it Korma anyway.

Here’s what you’ll need:

  • 1 can light coconut milk
  • 1 small can tomato sauce (4oz, I think)
  • 1-2 cups frozen peas
  • 16-20 cashews
  • 4 cloves garlic
  • 1 jalapeño
  • 1-2 cups carrots
  • 1-2 cups cauliflower
  • 1-2 bell peppers, any color
  • 1 onion
  • 1-2 cups potatoes

You’ll also need some spices and stuff:

  • 2 tsp brown sugar
  • 1/2 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/2 tsp garam masala (notice I didn’t have any. Try 1/4 tsp of coriander and 1/4 tsp cumin. It’s not perfect but it helps)
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1 Tbsp curry powder (I need to start making my own)
  • 2 tsp salt
  • some oil to start
  • Also, not pictured, some stock

I know. This recipe needs a lot of stuff. But here’s the thing; you can use pretty much any veggies. And if you like a lot more sauce than I do, you really only need 1 cup of any of said vegetable. The pictures I have show basically 2 cups of everything, and as you can see at the end I had basically a plate of veggies for dinner.

To prep! This part takes a while. That’s a crapload of veggies to prep out and I suck at prep. I blame my cheap knives. In this case, you’ll want to prep for three stages.

Stage 1: Mince the garlic, chop up the onion, and combine the spices with them.

Step 2: Put your tomato sauce with this stage. Cube the carrots and potatoes. Crush or chop the cashews. Chop up your jalapeño. If you’re a wussy yankee like me, remember that the seeds and placenta (white stuff) hold most of the heat. If you cut those out you can drastically reduce the spiciness of this dish:

 

Stage 3: Finally, chop up your peppers and cauliflower. Put the coconut milk and peas with this stage. Look how pretty it all looks before it’s cooked.

Here’s what it all looks like all prepped. Yes, I put the cauliflower in the wrong group. It will be mush if you cook it with the group of veggies in stage 2. Also, your peas go with stage 3, but mine were already back in the freezer:

 

Time to cook, which means a lot of stirring. Yay!

Start with stage 1. The onions, garlic, and spices all go into a big skillet with some oil. The liquid you’re seeing here is about a cup of stock:

Cook this down until the onion is tender. If you’re patient (I’m not) I bet if you cooked it until they started to caramelize it would be very tasty later. While you’re doing that, nuke your potatoes for 3-5 minutes in the microwave. Otherwise they will take forever to cook later. You might also want to give the carrots a a couple minutes, and the cauliflower a hit too. You won’t need to to pre-nuke the peppers.

Once the onion is tender, add your stage 2 ingredients. That means carrots, tomato sauce, cashews, and jalapeño.

Don’t forget to pull your potatoes out of the microwave too! Those go in now as well.

Cover this and let it do its thing until the potatoes and carrots are just barely tender. If you’re using a rice cooker, get that going about halfway through this step.

Once that’s done, you can go for stage 3! Peppers, coconut milk, cauliflower, and peas.

Mix this up and let it simmer at least 10 minutes. Or until your rice is done. Which can be a while if you forgot to do it earlier. That’s okay; the flavors in the sauce will keep melding as long as you need. As long as the veggies don’t get mushy you’re good.

Look how veggielicious this is! It went well over rice and reheated very well too.

 

If you don’t like this, well just remember.. Worthless people blame their korma.