Sunday Night: Indian and Indian-inspired food

This started quietly, as a recipe for ham hocks and split peas and then spiralled completely out of control. That's not a bad thing on Sunday. :-)

On Saturday I ran across a recipe for smoked ham hocks served on split peas with Indian spices in How to Cook Meat and decided to do that for Sunday. As a side effect, I bought a South Indian cookbook Saturday afternoon (Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India). This cookbook is full of great pictures and recipes that sound amazing, so of course I immediately needed to make something from it. A rice dish seemed logical, so we went with "Mustard Seed Rice".

The next required step was a trip to an Indian supermarket to get some of the more obscure ingredients. The place we went once before in Mountain View is now a Mexican market, so we went down to Cupertino, using the theory that we would have no problem finding an Indian market in Cupertino. It took less than 5 minutes. As long as we were there, we stocked up on some other pulses that I'd seen mentioned in the book and a package of pappadums. I think that, aside from vegetables, we're now pretty much set to make a variety of different dishes without too much trouble.

The end results of all this shopping and planning and cooking were awfully damn good. And we've got plenty of leftovers.

I'm sure to say more about this book and the different cooking techniques it uses in the future.