Curry Leaves

[lesliepear]

I took my SIL back to her home in Jersey City tonight. On the way home we stopped at an Indian grocery store near her, and found some curry leaves a co-worker of hers was looking for. They cost all of 50 cents a packet! I'm not sure what you do with them as I'm not an Indian food fan. sebab, have you ever used them?

I did find this link of 300+ recipies though.

Comments

[tanyalita.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for curry leaves. I'm so jealous!

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

If I lived closer to my SIL, I'd mail them to you (if that would work).

[sebab.livejournal.com]

You can drop them into a... curry, fairly early on, while you're still frying stuff. You can dry them and incorporate them into spice blends. Back in 2001 I bought an excellent pair of cookbooks -- if you can manage to get hold of them somehow, they're Classic Indian Cooking and Classic Vegetarian Indian Cooking, both by Julie Sahni. Each of them begins with a TON of information about the various ingredients used in Indian cooking, including recipes for spice blends that aren't very difficult to make if you have the ingredients. A lot of what I know is based on those books (and also on having experimented a little, of course)

[sebab.livejournal.com]

Just noticed the bit about you not liking Indian food after I posted, sorry. But you might actually find that what you don't like is the fare you've been offered in Indian restaurants in the US -- most of which tend to focus on North Indian/Moghul cuisine. There are an awful lot of subcultures on the Indian subcontinent, so it might be worth looking at recipes to see if an ingredient list catches your fancy. Like I said, the SDahni books are great, and you can sometimes find some of her recipes reproduced online by bloggers and so forth.

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the hint - maybe I'll check those books out of the library. I did have some homemade Indian food once and liked it better than the commercial stuff I'd tried. I work with a lot of Indians from all over the subcontinent and have noticed the difference in their cuisines.