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| Appam, Sri Lankan Lamb Curry, and Carrots with Tropical Flavors |
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| Toasting the spices...mmmmmm! |
Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.
For starters I got very, very excited about the chance to make a gluten-free flatbread. My hubby realized he has a significant sensitivity to wheat almost a year ago now, so there's been little-to-no bread baking around here, and no naan (which I love!)
Secondly, I love curry...pretty much all curry (Indian, Thai, white-trash...you name it). So all-in-all, I was pretty happy about the challenge for August. Within 2 days of it being posted online, I decided THAT WOULD BE THE NIGHT.
Unfortunately, I decided about 10:00 in the morning. What I didn't recognize was that the second stage of the appam recipe involved letting the batter stand for 8 - 12 hours. (I know, I know...I should have read it all the way through, but I just got so excited...). So instead, the raw rice got only 2 hours to soak, and then the batter got maybe another 6 to ferment. It made for a much thicker batter than it should have been, and as a result, the appam were...well, GLUEY. Yuck. I will have to try this again when I have the right amount of time, because I think, cooked correctly, they could have been quite tasty.
As for the curries, I made the Sri Lankan lamb curry. It was just delicious, although a bit of a pain as the only lamb stew meat you can get around here is BONE-IN, great for flavour but a whole lotta work if you actually want to EAT it. I thought the curry was delicious, but my husband and son thought the curry was actually too mild for their tastes (personally, I think the fact they wanted theirs on rice was at fault. Everyone knows rice neutralizes about half of the flavour of things!)
The run-away surprise hit of the dinner, though, was the "Carrorts with Tropical Flavors" side dish that was offered. You would think it was just a carrot salad, but it was SO much more than that, with the creaminess from the coconut milk and the savoriness and depth from the curry leaves and the shallots. Mmmmm...needless to say we made it again for company the same week and we will make it again often in the future!
