Brie’s Homemade Kosher Indian Shabbat Lunch!
Meet Brie, the Kosher Indian Hostess with the Mostess! She made an entirely authentic (and kosher) Indian Shabbat lunch for 12 people from scratch, how impressive!
Brie is a close friend of mine from our university days in Canada, and over the years we’ve been lucky to have lived in Boston at the same time, and now in New York at the same time. Brie and her family are Orthodox Jews who keep kosher. Back when we all lived in Boston, Sean and I first learned how to come up with a suitably kosher menu when we prepared our First Kosher Indian Menu at Brie’s house, upon learning that she and her husband Derek love Indian food. It was a huge hit with her community of friends. Brie recently moved to the New York area and has been planning on hosting a weekly Shabbat lunch for her new friends from her synagogue. When we were catching up a couple of weeks ago, she suddenly said, “Hey, why don’t I make it a kosher Indian lunch? What should I make?? Can you help me?” I sent Brie a few recipes from Big Apple Curry that I knew would be a) easy for her to follow and b) simple to make using ingredients she could find at any supermarket (in other words, she wouldn’t have to go to a specialty Indian grocer). After all, it’s one thing to make Indian food at home for the first time but it’s quite another thing to make multiple dishes to host nearly 12 people! She was certainly ambitious and I’m thrilled to say she pulled it off. As Sean and I entered her house on Saturday, we were greeted by the aromas of chicken curry simmering in onion, garlic, ginger, tomato, and spices, and oven-roasted curried cauliflower, cabbage, and peas. I promised Brie I would ‘fix anything that needed fixing’ as they say — other than me doing a quick taste test and adding a few dashes of this and that, she had followed every recipe dutifully and every dish was authentic. I was so proud of her!
Brie shares her experience making kosher Indian food for the first time…
When it comes to preparing a meal for Shabbat lunch, perhaps the biggest challenge is you need to cook everything in advance. This means that you have to choose dishes that will still taste fresh after they’ve been cooked once and then warmed up a second time on a blech/hot plate/warming drawer the next morning. There is definitely an art to cooking in advance – and not one that I’ve yet perfectly mastered! Once I sat down and read through the recipes for the Indian dishes I thought about making, I quickly realized that Indian food reheats really well, tasting just as good on the second day as the day they are prepared.
I would describe myself as an adventurous eater but not necessarily an adventurous cook. Unlike other people, cooking is not a passion of mine. I cook because I have to cook — I have three little children who need to eat well-balanced meals and my husband and I entertain a lot. I need to be able to put together a well-executed, festive meal when guests come over. Before I decided to make these Big Apple Curry recipes, I had not been inclined to prepare Indian food because I thought it was completely out of my cooking comfort zone. However, once I opened my cupboard and realized that aside from garam masala, I already had all of the spices I needed, it was clearly much easier than I imagined. As I stood in my kitchen on Friday afternoon, taking work conference calls in between browning and seasoning dishes simmering on the stove, I could see the recipes were in fact easier to master than many of the other recipes found in my cookbooks! I was motivated even when the workmen who happened to be in our house working on our heating system, kept saying “whatever you’re making smells amazing!” And, as you can see from the photos below, all of the dishes were indeed amazing. Good food + excellent company made for a great time. Thanks Ina!
Brie’s Kosher Indian Shabbat Lunch
Daddy’s Chicken Curry with Fingerling Potatoes
Chick Peas Curry
Easy Indian Roasted Vegetables
Curried Glatt Chicken Wings in a Coconut Curry Glaze
Glatt Beef Keema with Green Peas and Potatoes
Basmati Rice
Above: Daddy’s Chicken Curry with Fingerling Potatoes — so easy to make, and a dish everyone will love, including Brie’s son Daniel who wasn’t crazy about the idea of Indian food for a Shabbat lunch. Below: Glatt Curried Chicken Wings with a Coconut-Curry Glaze
Glatt beef keema with potatoes and sweet garden peas studded with whole cinnamon stick, cloves, and green cardamom
What’s more festive than lunch surrounded by friends? If you keep kosher and can’t find kosher non-dairy naan bread, you can get pita or scoop up kosher Indian food with challah like Brie did!
