Review of the Vegetable Biryani Recipe
Hi, Ray here again.
The weekend is here again so it’s time to try out another of those delicious Curry Focus recipes.
The past few weeks have seen me making meat dishes and that led me to look at the vegetarian recipes for a new recipe to try. I simply adore biryani recipes and found a Vegetarian Biryani recipe that was posted on the website only last month. The recipe uses a lot of vegetables so the curry must be healthy, right?
I made a note of the ingredients to buy and went to my favorite local vegetable store to get the fresh vegetables.
I had a closer look at the recipe when I got home and saw that there was an obvious error in the recipe. All up, the recipe had 1 1/2 lbs of vegetables, some large potatoes, 2 cups of rice and 1/2 cup of lentils. The recipe said that this was a curry for 4-6 people but this amount of food would easily feed double that number. And with all those ingredients, do you really need potatoes? I like potatoes as much as the next person but 6 large potatoes is way too much. So I changed the recipe to make it only 3 potatoes and made the potatoes totally optional.
As usual, I prepared all the ingredients before starting to cook and found that this is, like most of the Curry Focus recipes, a really easy recipe to follow. About the only difficult thing to do was fit all of the ingredients into my favorite large frying pan - I cook most curries in this great frying pan that I’ve had for years (it cost a lot of money when I bought it but has lasted well and still looks like it will outlast me).
It’s really important to make sure you use a large frying pan, or saucepan to make this curry otherwise it will not fit.
One major success for me was that the rice was perfectly cooked after 25 minutes in the final phase of cooking – I often end up with under cooked rice with the absorbtion method and it’s a delightful surprise when the rice turns out well.
I served the Vegetable Biryani to the assembled diners and there was a large serving for all with lots of healthy vegetables. All of the ingredients were cooked just right and the curry tasted wonderful – you could even taste the lentils. All of the diners enjoyed the biryani and it got a taste score of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat score of “medium to hot” (I must admit, I only found the curry to be medium but one person said that it was hot and I record the real scores to try and let everyone know what to expect – after all, my medium could be somebody else’s mild).
It occurred to me that this would be a great dish to make if you’re making a large family meal, or supplying one dish in a family meal, where people can help themselves to a selection of food and everyone gets some great biryani. I ended up freezing 4 servings of curry to save for work lunches. Wicked.
