Friday, January 8, 2010

vegetable biryani


A delicious, fairly easy, completely non-authentic dish. I modified this from Jamie's Food Revolution by Jamie Oliver, who is to my parents what Isa Chandra Moskowitz or Sarah Kramer is to me: deity of delicious, beautiful food and very directly responsible for their first forays into a new kind of cooking. Fair enough. The actual recipe had amounts, but this is one that you can eyeball and that you'll have to work to mess up. I just estimated what the dish I had would hold.

So, get an ovenproof dish that's more than an inch or so deep. Preheat the oven to 450 F. Make some rice. While the rice is cooking, make some curry - this is great if you have leftover curry you need to do something with, or you can be lazy like me and just make one quickly with curry paste and coconut milk and chickpeas. Rub the inside of the baking dish with Earth Balance and then sprinkle the whole thing with turmeric. Layer rice, curry, cashews (I bet raisins would also be good), and whatever other vegetables you want (or don't want - I bet it would work fine with tofu or even fake meat thrown in, but I can hear my friend Dino yelling at me already so just throw some vegetables in there. It's delicious no matter what) until you get to the top of the dish, but make sure the top layer is rice. Cut about a tablespoon of Earth Balance (cold) into bits and dot the top of the rice with it. Oil a big piece of foil and cover the dish, but leave a little lip so that it doesn't explode. Bake for about half an hour. NOM.

This was so good. The rice on top gets nice and crispy, the cashews get tender, and all the flavors just blend so well. And really, how hard is it to put some rice on the stove, throw some curry paste and coconut milk together in another pan, layer them, and let it bake? I made this with a friend over, while talking to her and watching TV. So easy and so good.

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