Sunday Cookbook Adventures: Kerala-Inspired Indian Feast

Where do I even begin with this meal? This was the most time I've spent in the kitchen in a very long time. It was a lot of fun, but also probably a bit insane... The forces responsible for this meal are two of my favorite cookbook authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and their fantastic book, Mangoes and Curry Leaves.

After the amazingness of my Kerala-style Curried Calamari, I had Kerala on the brain... so I turned to the index of Mangoes and Curry Leaves and started looking up dishes from the region. The Tilapia Green Curry appealed to me immediately, and I decided to pair it with a flatbread. Dosas sounded like a good choice, but apparently it's totally inappropriate to make dosas without a chutney and a sambhar... so I added Shallot Sambhar and Coconut Chutney to the menu... The Coconut Chutney also pairs well with the Chickpea Fritters, apparently, so those went on the list... Then, for reasons that are no longer clear to me, I added a Kerala-style Spiced Grated Carrots dish to the menu. Oh, and I decided to make a batch of plain homemade yogurt to use in the carrot dish. So, um... Yeah. This is one of those times when my compulsive nature gets the better of me. It's totally impractical to flip back and forth in a (beautiful) cookbook with this many dishes, so I typically copy the pages I need and hang them up in my work space:
Let's get to the food, shall we? (The epic length of this post is probably appropriate for the 12+ hours in the kitchen that the preparation of this menu entailed...)

Dosas
The dosas were surprisingly easy to make, despite the fact that the recipe description says that "it's not the simplest bread in the world to make"... It starts by soaking Urad Dal overnight.
The dal is then blended until smooth,
and combined with rice flour, water, and a thickened rice-flour-and-water paste, then allowed to ferment for many hours.
At dinner time, the dosas are cooked in a skillet and you're good to go. I took the authors' advice and had some Coconut Chutney handy to sample the dosas and make sure they were of sufficient quality. They were. (And they took the chutney to a new level, as well.)
I tried my first bite of coconut chutney and dosa at around 9pm, on a day where cooking had begun just after 7am... It was pretty much my first real taste of how this meal was going to turn out, and it was a relief after so many hours to know that it would all be worth it...

Shallot Sambhar
The Sambhar was probably my least favorite dish of the evening, but every other dish left me pondering how it was possible that something could taste SO. Freaking. Good... so that's not really an insult. The first step is to mix up a batch of sambhar powder. This starts with dried chilies, coriander seed, cumin seed, cinnamon stick, black peppercorns, and Toovar Dal.
The spices are toasted in a dry cast iron skillet (separately, since they require different cooking times)...
A spice grinder is used to grind the spices in batches, and you have a handy batch of sambhar powder for all of your cooking needs...
The next ingredient is tamarind pulp, softened in hot water and then pushed through a fine sieve.
The last few ingredients (in addition to a big pot of simmered Toovar Dal), are tomatoes, shallots, chilies, and curry leaves.
These are added sequentially to a hot pan (along with the tamarind liquid and sambhar powder)...
... then added to the simmered dal.
This was an attractive dish and was pretty good with the dosas, but, as I mentioned above, it just didn't blow my mind the way some of its company on the table did... Still glad to have made a sambhar, though, since I may never have lived down the shame of serving dosas without one...

Chickpea Fritters
Speaking of things that blew my mind... wow. I tasted these and had to go look at the recipe again because it makes no sense at all that they taste so good. You start with chickpeas (ideally from Rancho Gordo):
which are soaked in water for several hours or overnight.
The only other ingredients are shallot, ginger, chilies, and cilantro.
This all goes into a food processor and comes out a course mixture...
which you then shape into patties...
before deep-frying to golden perfection.
Honestly, these are one of my very favorite things from this feast. (There's a bit of a log-jam at the top of that list...) Combined with the Coconut chutney, these became almost transcendent. So simple. So very delicious. Awesome.

Coconut Chutney
Speaking of that chutney, this was one of my two coconut-wrestling matches of the weekend. The other (which you'll see in the Tilapia section) featured young coconuts, but the chutney required grown-up coconuts...
With my hacking cleaver, I was able to slice off the tops,
and a hammer helped me to break the rest into workable pieces... A little elbow grease and a vegetable peeler, and I had a big bowl of coconut meat.
Mmmm... As a kid, coconut was the one food that I thought I hated (before I realized that caraway seeds are made out of evil, that is). It wasn't until college and my first experience with Thai curries that I realized I only hate sweetened coconut, and that natural coconut is absolutely fantastic. I grated the coconut with the julienne blade on my food processor, and was ready to go.
The coconut goes into a blender with tamarind (prepared as above, only with less water), ginger, and chilies, while a "tempering" liquid is prepared from black mustard seeds, ground Toovar Dal, and curry leaves cooked in a little coconut oil
I feel like this should have been a food processor item rather than a blender item, and I ended up having to add some of the coconut water from the young coconuts (which was far superior to that from the grown-up coconuts) to get things to a blend-able consistency.
This was pretty tasty out of the bowl, but absolutely shined when it met a hot-from-the-pan dosa or a hot-from-the-fryer Chickpea Fritter. Well worth the scraped-up knuckles from my fight with the coconuts...

Kerala-Style Spiced Grated Carrots
This is a dish that I pondered dropping from the menu as exhaustion set in, but I'm extremely glad that I didn't, since it is one of those dishes clustered at the top of the ol' "Emmo's Favorite Foods from Sunday" list... and is another that left me baffled at how so few simple ingredients could taste so effing good.
Those ingredients are shallots, curry leaves, chilies, ginger, turmeric powder, and black mustard seeds, all of which go along with grated carrots and a little yogurt. (Are you starting to notice some redundancy in ingredient lists? It would appear that curry leaves, black mustard seeds, and chilies are sort of key to this cuisine...)
After black mustard seeds are popped in a little oil, the shallots and turmeric are added...
Then the rest...
The final ingredient is a little (homemade, in this case) plain yogurt, stirred through off the heat at the end of cooking.
This was absolutely fantastic. I had no expectations whatsoever for this dish. I had actually pondered making a half-batch, but ended up wishing I'd made a double batch. Fantastic. But on to the star of the show...

Tilapia Green Curry
This is another incredibly simple, incredibly delicious dish. Things start off with a Masala Paste, which starts off with fresh coconut. I had accidentally brought home young coconut (as mentioned above), but it was far too delicious not to use, and I thought it would be perfect in this dish...
Turns out young coconuts are WAY easier to wrangle than grown-up coconuts...
The rest of the Masala paste is ginger, garlic, shallots, chilies, cilantro, ground coriander, and ground turmeric...
which are puréed into a fantastically vibrant-looking paste...
The recipe also calls for tomatoes (or fish tamarind, which I could not track down), more chilies, curry leaves, coconut oil, and black mustard seeds,
as well as a "tempering" liquid of ghee, chilies, shallots, garlic, and curry leaves.Mustard seeds are popped in oil... curry leaves and Masala Paste deliciousness are added...
The tomatoes go in with a little water and things are brought to a simmer...
... then the tilapia is added and simmered until just cooked through.
The hot tempering liquid is added just before serving, and you have yourself an awesome curry. Trust me when I tell you that what it it lacks aesthetically it more than makes up for in flavor...
The young coconut is so bright and fresh, along with the ginger and cilantro. Another dish of very simple ingredients that comes together tasting way better than it has any business tasting.

So, there you have it. I will definitely be making several of these dishes again on their own, but it may be a good long while before I spend this kind of time in the kitchen for no apparent reason...
I really love this style of food, and I thought it was cool to see how the same basic ingredients could come together into such a varied array of deliciousness. I (obviously) ended up with leftovers, and every time I take a bite of a Chickpea Fritter, the Coconut Chutney, or those danged Carrots, I find myself baffled by how great they taste. The curry I knew I would love, but these sides were a revelation. It's always good when something educational can be simultaneously delicious... Yay, Kerala!