Dinner in the Yellow House

I dream of Vij's

There are a lot of reasons I won't be going to Vij's anytime soon:

• cost of travel to Vancouver
• time required to travel to  Vancouver
• once I get to Vancouver, lack of babysitter
• impossibility of taking M'hijo (my 18-month-old)  anywhere NEAR a restaurant which is known for making people wait for up to an hour for a table (because they don't take reservations)

The New York Times said that Vij's was "easily one of the best Indian restaurants in the world".  And it's just right there, over the water!  Right there

It might as well be in Mumbai (sniff!). 

Lucky for us Vancouver Islanders, however, Vij's now sells some of their entrees frozen in little metallic bags, suitable for boiling in the bag, or you can heat them up in the oven or microwave if you prefer.  Here is the list of available dishes. (Click for a version you may actually be able to read).

And where can you purchase some of these goodies?  The wonderful Charelli's, of course.  Call ahead to see when they're getting a shipment in (598-4794).

I took four shiny bags of Vij's goodness up camping this weekend and they were great.  We were a little skeptical that boil-in-the-bag dinner could be good, but we were happily surprised with the result.  We tried the Punjabi daal, Punjabi lamb curry, saag paneer, and garnet yam and green chili dumplings.  Thank goodness I had the forethought to toss the bowl of my rice cooker (half full with leftover rice) into the back of our van before we went off into the wilderness, because the sauce on the lamb in particular was really delicious, and without the rice to sop it up, it would have been wasted. 

Tobias claims this was the best Indian meal he'd ever had, but this was after two bottles of IPA, and really, doesn't everything taste better when it's eaten beside a river, in front of a roaring campfire?  I'd say it was certainly the best Indian meal I'd had outside of a restaurant. 

Best Butter Chicken Ever

Lest you think we in the Yellow House are all about growing our own food and making things from scratch, I will admit to using one particular convenience food quite a lot: butter chicken flavouring mixes.  For years, we've been searching for a way to make butter chicken easily at home that approximates the taste of our favourite butter chickens: Da Tandoor (Tobias' favourite) and Trimurti (my favourite). 

The findings:

• the worst way to make butter chicken is to simply add a sauce from a jar.  Patak's = yuck.  I've tried four types of jarred pastes/sauces and none were good. 
• having to add a lot of ingredients (butter, milk, tomatoes, tomato sauce) yourself seems like it would result in a better butter chicken, but this isn't necessarily the case.  A long-reigning winner was a little metallic packet that I found at the wonderful Seven Valleys (2506 Douglas Street) that required only the addition of milk.  Unfortunately I can't remember the brand name of this mix, and the Seven Valleys owner told me she had trouble restocking it after she ran out. 
• there does seem to be a correlation between the time taken to prepare the dish and the flavour.  The longer the cooking time, usually, the better the result.

Our unscientific survey has now ended with the discovery of Daksha's Gourmet Spices Butter Chicken mix.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mix leaves the cook with the most work to do of any of those we've tried, and takes a while to make (about an hour).  Still, it's much quicker than the recipe given to me by my daughter's best friend's former nanny, which started "Take a chicken, and the following spices...." and continued, "let it marinate for 24 hours at the least, 72 hours ideally" and finished "let it simmer for about half an hour" with some oven time somewhere in between. 

Daksha's spices are available by mail order from SpicesGourmet.com and also at Slater's First Class Meats (2577 Cadboro Bay Road), which is where I got mine.  I will now start experimenting with every Daksha's product I can find.  I love the fact that my favourite butter chicken mix comes from teeny little Williams Lake, BC! 

For the record, I have made butter chicken from scratch, once, when I was a young, silly bride.  The results were ho-hum.  If I remember correctly, I didn't handle the spices well.  I think I may have even burned them but put them in anyway.  If I do try again, I'll probably use one of the three recipes posted in MuslimVillage.