This was one of those recipes you make up as you go along which then turns out to be rather good, so you sit down straight after dinner to hastily reconstruct what you did before you forget it. It does use several spice mixes, I’m afraid, because that’s what I do when I’m cooking things that I don’t plan to turn into my own recipes… and of course, there are only two photos, because photographing my food at multiple points in the cooking process is really not something I do unless I’m planning to blog about it – which I wasn’t this time!
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1 1/2 cups dried chickpeas if you have a pressure cooker, or 2 tins cooked
1-2 tbsp virgin coconut oil
1 large brown onion, chopped
5 garlic cloves
2 red chillis
2 tsp ginger puree
1 finger-sized piece of turmeric, peeled and grate
2 big sweet potatoes – about 1.5 kg, I think – peeled and cubed
2 cups of water
2 tsp Spice Fusion Thai curry blend (contains coriander, cumin, chilli, turmeric, ginger, pepper, cloves, fennel, cardamom and white pepper)
1/2 a cauliflower
2 tbsp sunflower oil
2 tsp Gewürzhaus tandoori masala
basmati or jasmine rice, yoghurt, to serve
Now what will you do with it?
Cook the chickpeas in a pressure cooker until al dente. In mine, this is about 28 minutes at high pressure with about six cups of water and a spoonful of oil. Drain.
Melt the coconut oil, and sauté the onion, garlic, chilli, ginger and turmeric using the browning function of your slow cooker (or in a separate saucepan) until the onion is soft and everything is getting yellow. Incidentally, turmeric root is my new favourite thing – so very cool. And my hands are yellow now.
Peel and chop the sweet potato, adding to the slow cooker as you go. When all the sweet potato is added, add the chickpeas, water and Thai spice mix, and set the slow cooker to cook for 3 hours on low.
When the curry has about 45 minutes left to run, pre-heat the oven to 200°C and chop the cauliflower into large florets. Toss in a baking tray with the oil and the tandoori masala. Roast for about half an hour, turning halfway through.
Serve the curry over rice with some cauliflower florets as garnish, and a bit of yoghurt on top. You could add some coriander leaves to the curry at the end, but I forgot to, and it was pretty good in spite of this.
You will end up with WAY TOO MUCH CURRY. I suspect we are talking about 6-8 serves here. The cauliflower is about 3-4 serves.
Variations
This is vegan, gluten-free and nut free. It’s also nicely low-GI, what with the sweet potatoes and chickpeas, though you would want to make sure you stuck to Basmati or Doongarra rice if you didn’t want to spoil the effect. It’s rubbish for FODMAP avoiders, what with the onions, cauliflower and chickpeas, so sorry about that – you might take out one of these ingredients, but I think removing all three would significantly change the personality of this curry.
You don’t need a slow cooker for this, I just love my slow cooker. But a good, heavy pot over low heat on the stove (use a heat diffuser if you have one) or in the oven for an hour or two would probably do the trick nicely.
Once again, I don’t feel sufficiently knowledgeable about how curries work to suggest ways to mess with this one – really, anytime I produce a curry that tastes good, it’s a glorious and unanticipated surprise! I’m absolutely not going to mess with it if it works… but if you know more about curries than I do, feel free to make suggestions in the comments!