Angelique: Who says cooking for yourself has to be boring or time consuming? Certainly not. Watch Mojo.com.
I’m Angelica and today, we meet Rani to learn some nutritious and delicious North Indian cuisine.
My cooking is based mainly on vegetarian. I do make meats and everything else.
Rani: Today, we’ll be making beef, it’s called “Kima”. In India, we usually make it with lamb or goat, but here, I use beef. The spices that I use everyday are all in here, the red pepper—this is the ground turmeric, and the cumin. This is called garam masala which is a mix of the six spices and this is the salt. Fresh coriander is of course very important. And mainly, the thing focuses on fresh ingredients. You can have like ground garlic in the bottle and ground ginger. I usually add a little bit of oil or vinegar to it and keep it in the fridge. So whenever I’m making something, I sort of take a spoon and throw it in there and it’s much faster.
Angelique: Alright, so a little bit of preparation can go a long way?
Rani: So, I’m making Kima now. I have fried onions and tomatoes in there. These have been cooking for about 15-20 minutes, I guess. I had done this before. So, I’m going to add all the spices here. You can go by your taste and start with a little less and you can add more later. By the way, the curry powder that you get in the stores are usually the mix of some of the spices that I showed you with some turmeric in it. So basically, it’s the color that’s onto that which makes it curry powder.
Now, I’m going to add the beef. I have about a pound. If you have less time, you can do it on high heat, or if you want to walk around and do a few things, you can do it on low heat and stir it once in a while. Now, I’m going to add the ground fresh garlic. If you are a garlic lover, put in some more. Frozen peas, put some water in there a little bit. Now, you let it cook.
In the meantime, we’ll prepare the rice. There are different varieties, I use the one that’s called 817. With the Indian rice, a woman’s cooking is judged by how the rice turns out. Each grain is sort of separate.
Now, the rice has to be washed like four or five times at least. Because of the health benefits, I put in a pinch of garam masala and salt. Now, I have two bowls of rice, so I’m going to add four bowls of water to that. Add the water, leave it on high heat and just wait for it to come to the point of boiling and then we lower the heat and then cover it. And, we don’t open it. It’s Pandora’s Box so we just keep it closed until we think it’s thoroughly done which should be in 5-10 minutes.
Angelique: Alright. So let’s fix some plates.
Rani: Okay. Here we go. This is Kima Rice.
Angelique: And these little veggies that have magically appeared?
Rani: There you go. And the yogurt—this is it.
Angelique: Okay. So, we mix everything together…
Rani: Not all of it together. You do it like small portions at a time.
Angelique: There you go. Well, thank you so much for your time and we look forward to eating the rest of this meal.
Rani: Great. It was a pleasure.
