Indian Cooking 101 – Recipe #2: How to make easy Indian roasted vegetables
Indian Cooking 101 – our second lesson will focus on how to make easy oven-roasted vegetables. Indian-style. Think of it as Indian antipasto.
Objective:
- You will use one ground spice, which is the most synonymous with Indian cooking – curry powder
Now that you’ve learned how to make rice perfectly in lesson one, let’s move on to an easy, breezy Indian dish. Whether you like vegetables or not, you’ve gotta admit that oven-roasted veggies are hard to resist. There’s something about the caramelization that happens between vegetables and olive oil in a red hot oven that makes even roasted brussels sprouts taste like browned, herbaceous goodness. This is a simple dish that you can pair with anything you’re making for dinner — a nice piece of grilled meat or you can snack on it like cold vegetable antipasti the next day. It’s a dish my sister Myna and I make on a weekly basis. It ensures you get your vegetables and the Indian twist is slight.
You will be using one ground spice in this recipe: curry powder. Now, some of you may be smiling while others of you are frowning. Let me be clear: not all curry powders are created equal. The objective is to find one you like. You can find ground curry powder in nearly every corner store, major grocery store, or megastore these days. You can find it at specialty shops like Williams Sonoma and Dean & Deluca. Unlike some, I do not decry the use of curry powder in certain dishes. Curry powder has its place, particularly in things like curried turkey burgers, curried chicken salad with green apple and mayonnaise, and in simple preparations like these vegetables. If you’re really interested in more on this, see my post “What is Curry?” And finally, yes, I recommend using olive oil in this recipe, even though Indian cooking is not often associated with olive oil. Consider it an Indian antipasto. In all seriousness, olive oil is a terrific vehicle for roasting any kind of vegetable beautifully so it has that evenly roasted golden sheen.
How to make easy Indian roasted vegetables
Serves 6
Ingredients
- 1 small head of cabbage, shredded (sometimes I cheat and buy a bag of pre-shredded cabbage)
- 1/2 head of cauliflower
- 1 cup frozen green peas
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons curry powder
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
Preparation
- Prepare cabbage and cauliflower and place in a non-stick baking pan. Sprinkle the salt and curry powder evenly, combine well. Toss with the olive oil. Put the pan in the oven at 425F. No need to preheat. Isn’t that nice? Set timer for 10 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, take a peek and mix the vegetables around with a wooden spoon so they roast evenly. Push back in the oven and set the timer for another 10 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, pour in a cup of frozen peas. Push back in the oven for 5 minutes.
When it comes out of the oven, you should have a vibrantly colorful oven-roasted vegetable dish that you can eat as a side dish with anything else you’re preparing for dinner. If you don’t like cabbage or cauliflower or peas for that matter, you can substitute with a vegetable you like. If you use potatoes, be sure to dice them in small-to-medium pieces and they may need 5 more minutes in the oven.
I made this tonight and it’s amazing. I had some broccoli that needed to be use up, and I threw that in there too, which was a tasty addition. I was worried that the cabbage would cook too fast and burn, but that didn’t turn out to be the case! I also thought it might be too much curry powder- and yet again, I was happy to be wrong. So good. Thank you!
Hello Sadie!
It’s wonderful to hear that you enjoyed this recipe and adapted it with broccoli — that sounds delicious, I will make this with broccoli myself this week! As you note, I can imagine seeing “2 tablespoons of curry powder” in the recipe and thinking it’s quite a lot, but given the quantity of vegetables, it’s exactly the right amount, as you’ve discovered. We’re trying to help cooks have a delicious and satisfying experience with Indian cuisine, so we’ve put a lot of time and effort into finding the right balance of flavors in Big Apple Curry recipes. For many people new to Indian cooking, it can often appear like Indian recipes either add too much of one spice or not enough of another spice, and this can lead to people experimenting with Indian recipes in general. This is fine to do of course, but is sometimes the reason Indian dishes turn out either too bland or overpowering.
We hope that you will try more Big Apple Curry recipes!
With best wishes,
Ina
I made Indian roasted vegetables as a side dish last night for a dinner that included lamb and rice. It was very easy to make and turned out beautifully. I used part of a green cabbage as well as a red one. I will definitely be adding this one to the rotation.
Rebecca hi! Thanks for letting us know, it’s wonderful to hear it turned out so well. I agree, some of the simplest Indian recipes are the ones we make every week; we typically pair it with the chick peas curry, some brown basmati rice and some yogurt — or we make our weeknight Indian rice bowl! Check it out: https://bigapplecurry.com/2013/02/18/im-exhausted-but-we-need-dinner-solution/
Anything goes really, last week we had some leftover baby spinach and Sean tossed that in with the cauliflower. You can make so many varieties! Let us know what else you make from the blog!