Saturday Night Eats: Indian Themed

Earlier this week Greg and I attended a lovely retirement dinner for one of Greg's co-workers. For the meal we both opted for the vegetarian option, Chana Masala. The dish was really tasty and simple, the spices tasted great! But it was a little too simple, more veggies would have made it perfect.

Excited to try our own hand at the dish we decided that Saturday night would be Indian food night. I scoped out the inter-webs to see if I could find a suitable side dish and what could be more perfect than Naan bread? So that's what was on the menu, Chana Masala and homemade Naan bread.

Greg took on the role of chef and I baked it up...as per usual. He adapted this Chana Masala recipe. And I used this Naan bread recipe. There are a bunch of other recipes for Chana Masala on FoodGawker - check it out here.

We had most of the spices but needed to pick up mustard and corriander seeds:

The fixing's for the Chana Masala

The bread needed to rise twice. Once as a whole ball of dough, and the second time as individual balls which I rolled out just before frying them.

After rolling them I fried them in a bit of oil for 1.5-3 minutes on each side. It seemed like each piece was different so I had to watch them carefully. It was really satisfying when the bread started to bubble up.

This is the other side of the bread, I now understand why one side of Naan is always flat and the other is bubbly:

It turned out really well, especially for my first crack at it. The bread was soft and light - hooray!

Shout outs to Matt and Sarah who guessed what I was up to after I posted a poor quality camera phone picture to Twitter/Facebook last night. 

The finished product - yummy!

The almost complete Chana Masala, Greg's giving it a stir:

TaDa! The finished product, it was really great and much more satisfying with added vegetables. We decided that next time we'll just add more hot pepper to kick it up a notch.