janetupnorth
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I just got this from fellow missionaries who are in Pakistan. I thought it would be interesting to share:
Before getting to the recipes, I thought a few explanations would be necessary:
One of our language helpers has said that the dress, food, customs and worldview changes a bit every 40 or 50 miles here. So, the recipes I’m giving you might be authentic from my area but certainly not from everywhere in Pakistan. But, in a quest to make things as “authentic” as possible, following are some notes on ingredients.
Specialty items: Regular grocery stores might not have a few items required for some of these recipes. If there is a Pakistani or Indian ethnic food shop in your town, I recommend you go there to buy such ingredients as ground red chili (lal mirch), whole dried red chilies, fresh green fingerhot chilis (heri mirch), achar seasoning, garam masala, pomegranate seeds (anar dane), ground chickpea flour (besin) and various other things. For the boxed seasonings, Shan or National would be the brand you could buy.
Seasonings: You’ll notice that in most of the recipes I give you, the seasonings are unvaried. We can only get fruits and vegetables in season here, so a lot of the flavor of the meal comes from the featured fresh item. One common seasoning, ground red chili powder, is NOT the same as American chili powder, which is made from milder chilies and has garlic and other spices mixed in.
Oil: In the villages here they use clarified butter (ghee) from their buffalos, but in the towns we use canola oil. Compared to American cooking, a lot of oil is used in this kind of cooking. But you can tailor the amount to what is acceptable to you and your family.
Heat: I rarely mention heat settings. For most of these recipes, start out with medium-high to high heat to fry the onion. If you can work quickly and stir often you may not have to turn the heat down too much, but watch that you don’t burn things.
Onions and Chili peppers: Onions used are always red/purple onions. Fingerhot chili peppers are used, but in a pinch you could substitute jalapeños (but not one for one! Jalapeños have more fire.)
Yoghurt: Yoghurt is served with meals. It can tone down the curries if they’re too spicy to taste, or aid in digestion if the curries are too spicy to digest. What we get over here is whole milk yoghurt.
Bread (roti): If rice is not part of a meal, then flatbread is. The flatbread comes in a variety of styles (chapatti, tandoori roti, naan, paratha, etc.), but unless you want to learn how to make chapatti or you’re going to build a tandoor oven in your backyard, you might want to consider buying bread. If there is a Pakistani or Indian restaurant in your town, you could pick up fresh, hot bread from there. That would probably be a tastier option than buying the frozen bread possibly available at an ethnic food store. Sometimes we buy 20 pieces of roti at a time from our local tandoor and freeze the majority of it after we’ve eaten a meal. Then we’ll warm up roti halves or quarters in a toaster or oven. In a typical Pakistani home, multiple sister-in-laws prepare the meal: one makes chapatti, a couple of them work together to make salin (the curry), another makes chai for after the meal….so you don’t have one person doing everything at once, like in the typical American home. With many of the salins (curries) I write “serve with roti”. If this is too inconvenient, just eat them with rice.
Measuring: I apologize for not writing exact measurements – no one measures over here. They just know how much of whatever to add by sight. So, add enough oil to sufficiently fry things without burning them, and add spice and salt to your taste.
Garlic and Ginger: Garlic and ginger are usually mashed up in recipes. You could do this with mortar and pestle like we do here, or with a food processor.
Tomatoes: Tomatoes that we use are roma tomatoes. I recently read that there is a tomato problem in the states. In many recipes here tomatoes are optional, just for that additional depth of flavor. So you could just not add them until they are once again pronounced safe for eating.
Desserts: A word about desserts from here – the sweets are pretty
disgusting. At the ethnic food shop you’ll see boxes of mix for gulab jamun and barfi. Glance at the boxes and read the recipes and see if you don’t agree with me. Otherwise, we’ve been served some cardamom-flavored custards and sweetened vermicelli noodles in milk. That’s the extent of my experience with desserts here, thus far. If you wanted to have a complete meal Pakistani style, perhaps you could serve fresh fruit for dessert.
Having said that, below are a few recipes. Right now I can place my hands on about 15 other recipes, but I haven’t tried them all yet so I don’t want to send them to you untested. I have picked up a few techniques from language helpers and our househelper, but I have not focused on learning to cook from anyone yet. Sadly our househelper is now employed by someone else and I didn’t have her ‘teach me everything she knows’.
Where there is an easy English translation of the name, I include it in parentheses. If we were the honored guests at a (fairly well to do) national’s home, we would be served almost all of these in one meal, along with bread and fruit and sweets. It is odd and overwhelming, but at least the rest of the family gets a good meal once we, the guests, have finished eating however much we are going to eat.
Ground Beef and Cabbage (Qeema Gobhi)
Serve with roti or rice. Variations on this dish can be made -- instead of cabbage, any of these single ingredients could be added: green peas, green bell peppers, eggplant, cauliflower, diced green beans, or potatoes (or others). Potatoes and Cauliflower (Aloo Gobhi) may also be prepared with this same technique, with one difference: First the potatoes are added to the masala gravy, cooked for 10 minutes, and then cauliflower is added and cooked for an additional 10 minutes.
Ingredients:
Canola oil
1 red onion, diced
½ globe of garlic, peeled and mashed
2 square inch cubes of fresh gingerroot, peeled and mashed
1 roma tomato, chopped
1 large rounded Tbs of ground red chili powder (or more…or less)
1 rounded tsp ground coriander
1 rounded tsp ground cumin
1 tsp salt (or to taste)
1 pound raw ground beef
About 1 ½ to 2 pounds green cabbage, chopped
Fresh cilantro, chopped, to taste
Method:
Fry the onions in oil until they begin to brown. Add the garlic and ginger and brown for a minute or so. Add the tomato, red pepper, coriander, cumin, and salt and brown until the tomato has become slushy and gravy-like (this is how my language helper described it, but I’m not sure I would use the word “gravy”.) Add the ground beef, break up and stir into the masala for 5 or 10 minutes or until it is cooked. Add the cabbage and cook for 10 minutes or until it is sufficiently cooked. At any point, add a bit of water if necessary. At the end sprinkle on fresh cilantro, turn off the heat, cover and let the cilantro wilt.
Green Chutney (Subuz chutney)
Serve with raw vegetables as a dip. Serve alongside a rice dish, legumes, potato kebab, or pakoRas. Or just with roti.
Ingredients:
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
A fistful of fresh cilantro
A fistful of fresh mint
3 fingerhot chillies
3 walnuts, shelled and toasted (or 6 big chunks of shelled walnuts)
½ tsp of salt, or more
1 C plain yoghurt
Method:
Smash the garlic, cilantro, mint, chilies and walnuts together (or use a food processor). Slowly add a bit of yoghurt and the salt and continue smashing until everything is in microscopic pieces and well mixed. Then stir in the remaining yoghurt.
Fried Chickpea-Floured Vegetables (PakoRa)
People like to eat these hot with chai on rainy days. They are very tasty served with the Green Chutney as a dip. This can also be made with cauliflower and zucchini, along with the other vegetables.
Ingredients:
1 lb ground chickpea flour, which is called “Besin”, and is found at an Indian/Pakistani ethnic food store
2 tsp salt
1 – 3 tsp ground red chili powder
½ tsp black pepper
A handful of fresh cilantro
1 Tbs pomegranate seeds, or “Anar Dane” (but this is optional)
2 onions, diced
2 small potatoes
1 bunch spinach
A few pieces of fresh mint (also optional)
½ tsp ground cumin
Canola oil
Method:
Mix the flour, seasonings and seeds together, with water to make a thick, pasty dough. Let stand for a couple of hours if you have the time. Chop the other ingredients finely and add them to the mixture just before frying in oil. Drop by the tablespoon into oil and fry until browned. Drain on paper towels or some other way.
The vegetables could be cut another way – into thin slices – and then dipped into the batter and fried in individual slices.
Before getting to the recipes, I thought a few explanations would be necessary:
One of our language helpers has said that the dress, food, customs and worldview changes a bit every 40 or 50 miles here. So, the recipes I’m giving you might be authentic from my area but certainly not from everywhere in Pakistan. But, in a quest to make things as “authentic” as possible, following are some notes on ingredients.
Specialty items: Regular grocery stores might not have a few items required for some of these recipes. If there is a Pakistani or Indian ethnic food shop in your town, I recommend you go there to buy such ingredients as ground red chili (lal mirch), whole dried red chilies, fresh green fingerhot chilis (heri mirch), achar seasoning, garam masala, pomegranate seeds (anar dane), ground chickpea flour (besin) and various other things. For the boxed seasonings, Shan or National would be the brand you could buy.
Seasonings: You’ll notice that in most of the recipes I give you, the seasonings are unvaried. We can only get fruits and vegetables in season here, so a lot of the flavor of the meal comes from the featured fresh item. One common seasoning, ground red chili powder, is NOT the same as American chili powder, which is made from milder chilies and has garlic and other spices mixed in.
Oil: In the villages here they use clarified butter (ghee) from their buffalos, but in the towns we use canola oil. Compared to American cooking, a lot of oil is used in this kind of cooking. But you can tailor the amount to what is acceptable to you and your family.
Heat: I rarely mention heat settings. For most of these recipes, start out with medium-high to high heat to fry the onion. If you can work quickly and stir often you may not have to turn the heat down too much, but watch that you don’t burn things.
Onions and Chili peppers: Onions used are always red/purple onions. Fingerhot chili peppers are used, but in a pinch you could substitute jalapeños (but not one for one! Jalapeños have more fire.)
Yoghurt: Yoghurt is served with meals. It can tone down the curries if they’re too spicy to taste, or aid in digestion if the curries are too spicy to digest. What we get over here is whole milk yoghurt.
Bread (roti): If rice is not part of a meal, then flatbread is. The flatbread comes in a variety of styles (chapatti, tandoori roti, naan, paratha, etc.), but unless you want to learn how to make chapatti or you’re going to build a tandoor oven in your backyard, you might want to consider buying bread. If there is a Pakistani or Indian restaurant in your town, you could pick up fresh, hot bread from there. That would probably be a tastier option than buying the frozen bread possibly available at an ethnic food store. Sometimes we buy 20 pieces of roti at a time from our local tandoor and freeze the majority of it after we’ve eaten a meal. Then we’ll warm up roti halves or quarters in a toaster or oven. In a typical Pakistani home, multiple sister-in-laws prepare the meal: one makes chapatti, a couple of them work together to make salin (the curry), another makes chai for after the meal….so you don’t have one person doing everything at once, like in the typical American home. With many of the salins (curries) I write “serve with roti”. If this is too inconvenient, just eat them with rice.
Measuring: I apologize for not writing exact measurements – no one measures over here. They just know how much of whatever to add by sight. So, add enough oil to sufficiently fry things without burning them, and add spice and salt to your taste.
Garlic and Ginger: Garlic and ginger are usually mashed up in recipes. You could do this with mortar and pestle like we do here, or with a food processor.
Tomatoes: Tomatoes that we use are roma tomatoes. I recently read that there is a tomato problem in the states. In many recipes here tomatoes are optional, just for that additional depth of flavor. So you could just not add them until they are once again pronounced safe for eating.
Desserts: A word about desserts from here – the sweets are pretty
disgusting. At the ethnic food shop you’ll see boxes of mix for gulab jamun and barfi. Glance at the boxes and read the recipes and see if you don’t agree with me. Otherwise, we’ve been served some cardamom-flavored custards and sweetened vermicelli noodles in milk. That’s the extent of my experience with desserts here, thus far. If you wanted to have a complete meal Pakistani style, perhaps you could serve fresh fruit for dessert.
Having said that, below are a few recipes. Right now I can place my hands on about 15 other recipes, but I haven’t tried them all yet so I don’t want to send them to you untested. I have picked up a few techniques from language helpers and our househelper, but I have not focused on learning to cook from anyone yet. Sadly our househelper is now employed by someone else and I didn’t have her ‘teach me everything she knows’.
Where there is an easy English translation of the name, I include it in parentheses. If we were the honored guests at a (fairly well to do) national’s home, we would be served almost all of these in one meal, along with bread and fruit and sweets. It is odd and overwhelming, but at least the rest of the family gets a good meal once we, the guests, have finished eating however much we are going to eat.
Ground Beef and Cabbage (Qeema Gobhi)
Serve with roti or rice. Variations on this dish can be made -- instead of cabbage, any of these single ingredients could be added: green peas, green bell peppers, eggplant, cauliflower, diced green beans, or potatoes (or others). Potatoes and Cauliflower (Aloo Gobhi) may also be prepared with this same technique, with one difference: First the potatoes are added to the masala gravy, cooked for 10 minutes, and then cauliflower is added and cooked for an additional 10 minutes.
Ingredients:
Canola oil
1 red onion, diced
½ globe of garlic, peeled and mashed
2 square inch cubes of fresh gingerroot, peeled and mashed
1 roma tomato, chopped
1 large rounded Tbs of ground red chili powder (or more…or less)
1 rounded tsp ground coriander
1 rounded tsp ground cumin
1 tsp salt (or to taste)
1 pound raw ground beef
About 1 ½ to 2 pounds green cabbage, chopped
Fresh cilantro, chopped, to taste
Method:
Fry the onions in oil until they begin to brown. Add the garlic and ginger and brown for a minute or so. Add the tomato, red pepper, coriander, cumin, and salt and brown until the tomato has become slushy and gravy-like (this is how my language helper described it, but I’m not sure I would use the word “gravy”.) Add the ground beef, break up and stir into the masala for 5 or 10 minutes or until it is cooked. Add the cabbage and cook for 10 minutes or until it is sufficiently cooked. At any point, add a bit of water if necessary. At the end sprinkle on fresh cilantro, turn off the heat, cover and let the cilantro wilt.
Green Chutney (Subuz chutney)
Serve with raw vegetables as a dip. Serve alongside a rice dish, legumes, potato kebab, or pakoRas. Or just with roti.
Ingredients:
3 or 4 cloves of garlic
A fistful of fresh cilantro
A fistful of fresh mint
3 fingerhot chillies
3 walnuts, shelled and toasted (or 6 big chunks of shelled walnuts)
½ tsp of salt, or more
1 C plain yoghurt
Method:
Smash the garlic, cilantro, mint, chilies and walnuts together (or use a food processor). Slowly add a bit of yoghurt and the salt and continue smashing until everything is in microscopic pieces and well mixed. Then stir in the remaining yoghurt.
Fried Chickpea-Floured Vegetables (PakoRa)
People like to eat these hot with chai on rainy days. They are very tasty served with the Green Chutney as a dip. This can also be made with cauliflower and zucchini, along with the other vegetables.
Ingredients:
1 lb ground chickpea flour, which is called “Besin”, and is found at an Indian/Pakistani ethnic food store
2 tsp salt
1 – 3 tsp ground red chili powder
½ tsp black pepper
A handful of fresh cilantro
1 Tbs pomegranate seeds, or “Anar Dane” (but this is optional)
2 onions, diced
2 small potatoes
1 bunch spinach
A few pieces of fresh mint (also optional)
½ tsp ground cumin
Canola oil
Method:
Mix the flour, seasonings and seeds together, with water to make a thick, pasty dough. Let stand for a couple of hours if you have the time. Chop the other ingredients finely and add them to the mixture just before frying in oil. Drop by the tablespoon into oil and fry until browned. Drain on paper towels or some other way.
The vegetables could be cut another way – into thin slices – and then dipped into the batter and fried in individual slices.