It was another dreary, icky day and normally these days make me want to just curl up on the couch and order in a pizza and call it a day.  But no, today I resolved to make meal I’ve been wanting to make for…well, about a week.  But still, I had the ingredients, I had the recipes, I had the resolve to make my own dinner and not just fold myself into one of Anthony’s Gourmet Pizzas.

Now, I love Indian food.  Love it.  Indian and Thai food are two of my all time favorite cuisines.  I just love the flavors and the spices.  I’m lucky in that there are a host of good Indian restaurants in town (my favorites are Shalimar and Mahek), but I’ve always wanted to learn to make it myself.

Luckily, the internet is a wonderful thing.  After all, it brought you and I together, didn’t it?  It also brought me to the two wonderful people who made my dinner tonight possible.

First I discovered the Indian Butter Chicken recipe linked below.  I’d seen recipes before but it was the photo here that just made me drool.

You can thank Paul from India.  Paul, you are awesome.  I just want you to know that.
Paul’s Butter Chicken on Flickr.

The other glorious thing the internet brought me was the side dish, which came from an Indian food blog, Sailus Kitchen. Their recipe for a potato dish called Bangaladumpa Vepudu looked just too delicious to pass up, and lucky for me again, we’d just gotten in a generous pound of potatoes from our farm share this week.  Clearly the gods of the internet was willing this to be.
Check out the recipe for Bangaladumpa Vepudu.

I did add my own twist a bit to the dishes, using up extra ingredients from the farm share:

I added diced green bell pepper to the chicken and then finished it off with a bit of chopped fresh parsley.
I used boneless skinless chicken breasts, chopped into large pieces for easier eating.
I steamed the potatoes with a clove of garlic to get in a bit more flavor and to retain the nutrients that would otherwise leak out during the boiling.

I adjusted the seasoning in both dishes to cover ingredients I didn’t have, like methi powder.
I added one jalapeno and one Hungarian wax pepper, chopped, to the potatoes when they started to fry.

It was delicious.  Spicy, flavorful, everything I really wanted.  If you’re not into spicy, you’ll want to adjust the seasonings to fit your tastes.  Either way, you’ll love both dishes.