Kitchen Experiments : Bhangra in Bangkok!

I know the title of the post seems like the name of an Akshay Kumar flick, but hear me out - I was going to christen this post 'Vaguely Thai parathas, or, Punjab meets Pattaya'. But a colleague at work took one bite and said - "This is more like Bhangra in Bangkok!" - so here it is! :)


It started with Mom's policy that if I while away the morning doing nothing productive (read : I dont work out), then she would NOT pack my lunch for me. I had jolly well make my own lunch for work rather than "scribbling all over walls on Facebook!" :D
While I completely understand and appreciate her efforts at making me independent, cooking up roti-subzi in the morning can be tedious. Not to mention bo-O-ring. I needed something exciting to kickstart the day!

So off I went. Finely - and I mean as finely as you can - chopped carrot, cabbage and capsicum (How alliterative!).


Then stir-fried some Thai green curry paste in a couple of teaspoons of oil, dumped the minced veggies and stir fried for a few minutes till the veggies were almost-cooked. Mashed in a potato, adjusted the salt-n-sugar to taste and finally added a dash of lime juice.



(Well, if you MUST know, I did BURN my first batch of curry paste because the oil was too hot. Pungent smoke filled the kitchen as well as my lungs and eyes and I was reduced to a spluttering, coughing, streamy-eyed excuse for a chef. NOW dont say I don't tell it all! :) )

This potato-and-veggie stuffing was allowed to cool and then used to stuff parathas, just like normal aloo parathas. You can of course shape the parathas any way you like - I didn mine 2 ways - one, where I made a bowl of the kneaded dough, stuffed a ball of stuffing, closed the dough-bowl over it and rolled it out; and the other where I first rolled out the dough, then
flattened out the stuffing on it as thinly as I could and then folded the dough over it to make a square parcel.

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

The parathas were then cooked on a tawa (griddle) with a hint of oil to help them sizzle and get a nice golden-brown tan. :)

The traditional stuffed paratha

Though this recipe may sound bizarre, I have it on authority that the end product tastes good - from an exotic-food-phobic colleague. He shudders from eating pizza/pasta/Chinese - everything other than simple home-cooked Indian food. So his testimony is of the highest credibility! :)