dinner, January 10
Meal: hard-boiled eggs and potatoes in a chili-tumeric coating, white rice
Approximate cost per person: about $1.40
Active cooking time: About an hour.
Leftovers: enough for lunch for one hungry person or two less hungry people
Local ingredients: potatoes, eggs
Organic ingredients: rice, tomato puree, spices
Last night was new recipe night. I made hard-boiled eggs and potatoes in a chili-tumeric coating (the recipe actually calls it a crust) from Great Indian Feasts, which I checked out of the library last week. It… wasn’t bad. Jeff seemed to care for it more than I did, but I am also consistently critical of my own cooking. I’m sure that if it was prepared by someone who knew what they were doing it would be better, but it wasn’t bad.
You’ll find the recipe after the fold.
Start by hard boiling the eggs. Once they’re done, you peel them and cook them in an oil, chili powder, and tumeric mixture until they have a nice crust. Remove the eggs to a bowl and cook a bunch of diced potatoes in the same mixture until they’re brown and crusty. Remove the potatoes, add more spices and a small onion (tip if you’re living with someone who likes onion flavor but not texture: grate the onion on a cheese grater. Especially in a sauce, the onions themselves will disappear, but the taste will stay), and tomatoes or, in our case, tomato puree, and water, then cook that everything is nicely combined, then add back in the potatoes and cook until tender, then add the eggs back in to warm them up.
I served this up with white rice (made in the rice cooker) because we’d already had brown rice once this week, which I think was a mistake; I think that this would have gone better with brown rice (or, ideally, jasmine, but we had none of that in the house). The sauce went well with the rice and well with the potatoes, but the potatoes and the rice didn’t match very well. I think we’ll eat the leftovers on their own and turn the rice into rice pudding.
This took over an hour of active preparation time, because I’m not used to juggling meals where you cook many components and then combine them like this. I did save myself some time and aggravation by having things like spices measured out and ready to go when they were needed (I measured out some of them while the eggs were boiling, then some while the eggs were cooking, and so on.) It was an enjoyable process - I like cooking, and it’s relaxing, so it’s nice to make more complicated meals on the nights I have time - but this is definitely not a meal for a night when you’re in a hurry.
Now, a word about spices. Spices are, without a doubt, expensive. I bought six spices for this recipe, something that would have cost me upwards of $20 at a normal grocery store. However, our local co-op had all of the spices in bulk, which meant that they were cheaper per ounce than they would be in bottles. Buying them created less waste, and I was able to buy closer to the amounts that I needed. I won’t have a whole bottle of coriander wasting away in the spice drawer (but I still have plenty left for the next few Indian recipes I try.) If you have somewhere locally that you can buy spices in bulk, it is totally worth an extra trip to that store over your normal grocery shopping.
