Adventures in Curries

Last week I got my cookbook for my newest favorite recipes of simple Indian food: vegetables stuffed with lamb and basmati rice, spicy cucumber salad, and beet salad. I had gotten all of the recipe out of a year old issue of Prevention magazine (good mag for health nuts like myself), and have fallen completely in love with all of them so much so that I broke down and got the cookbook. I'm so excited about it! Especially the recipes with butternut squash, one of my favorite foods for the fall!

The book is called 5 Spices, 50 Dishes: Simple Indian Recipes Using Five Common Spices by Ruta Kahate. I ordered it on Amazon for a steal of a deal and it was readily in stock, as opposed to all of the brick and mortar stores where not a single one had it in stock and the price was much higher. Gotten love Amazon. Anyway, once I try some more of the dishes out of this cookbook, I will share them. A lot of the spices used in this book are very good for digestion and food is especially healthy in how it is prepared. Can't wait!

Now that I have discovered that I like Indian food, I decided to be adventures in my eating the past few days. On Tuesday, my husband and I took my mother in law out to our favorite restaurant in the Quad Cities, Le MeKong (I highly recommended the Pho Bo and Spring Rolls, yummy). Since my usual dish is quite heavy on the red meat (a big no no for my GB diet) I had to select something different from the menu. I settled on a Tofu Curry dish and could not have been more pleased. It was a fairly mild curry and the dish had tofu, zucchini, tomato, pineapple, and onion. The curry tasted amazing on the tofu and zucchini and I was excited to have leftovers for lunch today! I avoided the pineapple and tomato because they are too acidic for me and have caused me many a tummy ache the last few years, but I didn't care what they tasted like because everything else tasted so good!

After having such a good experience Tuesday night, I was trying to figure out what to eat for dinner on Wednesday. I was laying down during my acupuncture session trying to figure dinner out and all I could think of was curry. Curry sounded so good again. So we ventured out to the Indian restaurant in Peoria, Sizzling India. I had a hard time finding something to eat, given not only my strange food allergies (it is nearly impossible to avoid carrots sometimes) but my diet restrictions at the moment, so I ended up enlisting the help of the waitstaff. The owner was especially helpful, listening to all of my food sensitivities and personal taste preferences, and recommend a very tasty dish for me. It was a chicken curry with peppers and tomatoes and the taste was quite good and the spice mild enough for me to eat. I would have liked to have had more vegetables in the dish, and a lot less onion, but it was quite good nonetheless. I did have some issues with heartburn last night and this morning from all the onions, but by lunchtime it had all cleared up (sans any OTC drugs, thank you very much!).

I really want some more tofu curry. Hopefully I can find a similar recipe and make it at home, but until then, at least I have my new cookbook to experiment with!