First times?

Okay, I admit that's a spicy subject title...

...but I'm cooking Indian food tonight for the first time!

...so, still spicy but in a different way.

I normally cook a lot of Indonesian-Chinese, Italian, British Isles, and fusion sort of foods, so I'm looking forward to trying something different, but I fully admit this meal could be entirely hit-or-miss...

I'm going with:

a kale & chickpea recipe

daal/dahl/dal (a food I could probably eat every day of my life and never get tired of it)

and two different cauliflower recipes, one which is essential aloo gobi (but I'm not including the potatoes), and one where you bake the whole head of cauliflower and pour a tomato-based sauce on just before serving.

...and yes, somehow my menu turned out vegetarian.

That was entirely coincidental.

Have you tried anything new lately for the very first time?



UPDATE: including prep time, 1 1/2 hours until complete. In case you're curious, I'm updating to include the linked recipes.

As for hit-or-miss?

The daal was the perfect flavour that I was going for, which was surprising since there seems to be a billion different daal recipes online and I ended up just choosing the easiest one to make, but since I used dried lentils instead of canned, it was a little drier (texture-wise) than it should have been. It was an easy fix to just stir in a bit of extra water at the end.

The kale/chickpea thing was surprisingly good and it was a nice non-spicy flavour to balance out the rest of the meal.

The cauliflower aloo gobi... since I didn't put potatoes in and instead just added more cauliflower, the ratios were a little off. Next time, I'm going to use 3/4 head instead of the entire thing.

The baked cauliflower dish was really good, again, a nice contrast to the spicy aloo gobi and daal, but unfortunately it didn't cook entirely through so the centre was crunchy. Next time I think quartering it before baking would be better, even though it won't look quite as cool presentation-wise.