You're going to hate me for the next few weeks. Sunday I decided I was REALLY craving desi food! I have been for a really long time, and not being able to be home to go see my grandparents has really put a damper on my Indian food intake. A few weeks ago I called my grandma to get her recipe for Samosas and Chutney.
I wrote down her chutney recipe, and I got her Samosa recipe from my brother (patience, my friends; next week is samosas ;) ). And I just didn't seem to have the time or the energy to make these magnificent things! So Sunday, Mr. H had work in the morning and I took the opportunity to catch up on some much needed sleep. When I woke up, I for once felt refreshed and ready for the day! I thought, "Today is the day I'm going to take back the blog!", and if you remember my grand re-intro, I did indeed take back the blog. I also decided that I wanted some food from home, and gosh darnit I was going to make it and spend all day cooking if I needed to! You guys, I spent all day cooking. And I was so exhausted by the end of the night, I plopped into bed and had the hardest time waking up for work the next morning. But it was not a waste, I made lots of yummy things that remind me of home.
I'm going to be totally honest with you guys: I'm teasing you this week. This chutney is fantastic, but honestly I've never put it on much else other than samosas or kopyanjo (they're like samosas but in egg roll form) or paratha (spoilers...). But in all honesty, I'm giving you this first in my Indian Dinner Series for good reason. Not only do I love keeping you guys coming back, but this is one of the more time consuming recipes, and it took a lot longer than I thought it would. So making this recipe this week and keeping it in a jar prepared for next week is a good thing.
When I was a little girl, I lived either with my grandparents, or we were neighbors. Being homeschooled for a very large chunk of my life, it goes without saying that I spent a lot of time with them (mostly my grandma since my grandpa was usually seeing his patients until late at night). My grandma used to make chutney all the time; we ran out very quickly and we had the same things for dinner a lot. And a lot of the time, she would ask me to help her clean the Cilantro with her. Half because I'm sure she wanted to teach me, and half because my grandpa would buy her pounds of cilantro at a time and she would clean it all at once. If you don't believe me when I say pounds, imagine this: there was so much cilantro that it would cover a 4 person kitchen table at a time. Needless to say, she would take all the help she could get. When I made this Sunday, I had completely forgotten how long it took to actually clean it up, and dove right in thinking it would take half an hour at the most. Folks, cilantro takes a lot of time clean off.
Regardless, this recipe is SUPER tasty, SUPER cheap to make, and pretty versatile as a topping for any Indian dish you make. Let's get started!
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| The bottle that's covered is Garlic Powder |
The first thing you need to do is take each bushel of cilantro, and run it under cold water. Then set it on a plate or lay out newspapers on your kitchen table and lay the cilantro on the papers. Sitting down for this step is a very good idea (one which I did not employ, sadly).
Next, grab a tupperware bowl, and fill it with ice cold water. Then, to be sure you shock your cilantro well enough, drop some ice cubes in the bowl of water.
Now we're going to clean the cilantro. Take one stem of cilantro at a time, and pick off the leaves and the larger stems. The stems that are thin can stay, but make sure you clean off the stems that look like they could support a flower. These stems are too large, and though they may break down in your blender, they're going to give your chutney a very woody taste and texture that doesn't necessarily go with what it's accompanying. Throw out the big stems, and put the leaves and thin stems into your ice water bowl. When the bowl looks like all of the cilantro is floating at the top, stick your finger in there and swirl it around to make sure everything is underwater. This step takes a while, but I assure you, it is well worth the effort.
Once you've cleaned all of your cilantro (I cleaned mine one bushel at a time), take a slotted spoon and pull out your cilantro. Push it down into the spoon gently to get the excess water out before blending, then drop it into the blender. With using 2 large bushels, I had to take my spoon and smash the cilantro into the bottom of the blender to fit it all in. Don't worry about smooshing your cilantro too much so that it keeps it's shape. You're blending it anyway, it won't look even remotely like what it did when you started.
Now comes the fun part! Once all of your cilantro is in the blender, add your spices and lime juice, pop the cap on your blender and pulse away! It's a little important to note that you should not pulse for a few seconds and stop. The juice needs a little time to sink to the bottom and mingle with the cilantro. I held my pulse button down for a very long time and watched the juice creep up the side and slowly incorporate the cilantro and spices by itself. This does not mean that I didn't stop it every minute or so to smash my cilantro down under the blade, but I didn't do it every 10 seconds. When I did smash it down, I made sure to turn everything over making sure that I put some of the already blended chutney on top of the unblended cilantro just so the blade was getting new stuff and not blending the same thing over and over again.
I hope you guys liked the first of The Indian Dinner Series, and I promise it'll be much more exciting in the weeks to come! As always, enjoy!
*I'm not going to bother with a calorie count on this one as I'm HORRIBLE at servings sizes when it comes to chutney :) If you feel like you need a calorie count on the batch, I like to use my recipe box on myfitnesspal.com. If you have an account, go under "Food", then there's a tab that says "Recipes" go ahead and click and on that and there should be a section to make a new recipe. Just add in the stuff you're using at home and decide about how many servings there are in the batch you've made and it'll spit out a number per serving for you. If you don't have a myfitnesspal account, it's free to sign up and I've found it super helpful in my quest to eat healthier and lose weight :)
Ingredients:
2-3 Bushels of Cilantro
1/2 tsp salt per bushel
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tbsp lime juice
1.) Rinse cilantro under cold water; rinse thoroughly
2.) Pick off large/thick stems. Put smaller stems and leaves into icebath
3.) Place all ingredients into blender, blend until thick, homogenized consistency.
4.) Add spices and seasonings to taste. Refrigerate until ready to use. Enjoy!
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