Navratan (Vegetable) Korma and my Failed Naan

Mat was coming over for lunch yesterday so I thought I might try something Indian but mild. And I felt like baking something so naan bread to go with the curry would be a good choice.

Navratan korma is my favourite Indian dish ever. However, I reallly hate it when they make it out of pre-cut frozen vegetables and there’s no interesting vegetable in it. My favourite navratan korma comes from a little shop in Clayton called Moza Corner where they add mashed pumpkin into the sauce. My favourite Indian restaurant in Melbourne Bombay By Night in Caulfield North does very disappointing navratan korma (pea, carrots, beans, that’s it!) but everything else is fantastic.

I digress. Navratan (‘nine gems’) korma a vegetarian dish. Unlike a meat korma dish, it tends to be a bit milder and creamier – from my experience anyway. This was a very mixed up korma because I kept tasting and adding things. I also used very little oil so it turned out more like a vegetable stew rather than proper korma but it was very yummy (even if I may say so myself). It doesn’t look very sexy. Stewed vegetables never do but before it was ready it was very pretty with all sorts of colours.

You can use any veggies you want. You can also add paneer. I didn’t have any but I had an idea that I would just by ricotta and squeeze the living daylight out of it to make paneer. I don’t know if that works.

I used (generous servings for 2 + 1 doggie bag portion):

1. 1/2 cup of broccoli florets
2. 1/2 cup of cauliflower florets
3. 1/2 a large carrot
4. 1/4 a zucchini
5. 5 mushrooms
6. 4 long beans
7. 1 small potato, cubed (the peeler went AWOL so didn’t peel it, which turned out to be a good idea otherwise it would have disintegrated into the curry)
8. 1/4 green capsicum
9. 1 stalk asparagus
10. 1/2 tomato, finely chopped
11. 1/2 onion, sliced
12. 1 tbsp Patak’s korma paste (the recipe on the jar says 1/4 jar for 2 which I completely ignored)
13. 1/4 cup coconut milk (leftover from curry the other night – to be posted)
14. 1/2 cup of carton pumpkin soup (I would have used mashed pumpkin instead but I was too lazy to peel the whole pumpkin we have)
15. 1/4 cup of cream
16. 1/4 cup of water
17. 1/4 cup of crushed unsalted cashew nuts
18. (I forgot but I would have added) 3 tbsp of frozen peas

Fry the veggies together with the korma paste. Add water, coconut milk, pumpkin soup and cashew nutes. Simmer for 15 minutes. Stir occasionally. Don’t be tempted to add too much water because the veggies will give up some more water while it’s simmering. In the last few minutes, add the frozen peas and cream and stir before serving.

The naan! Oh the naan! Well that was a total failure. It came out look like flat bread. It smelt wonderful and tasted gorgeous (let’s face it, anything fresh out of the oven is awesomely nice) BUT IT DIDN’T LOOK OR TASTE LIKE NAAN.

I found some packets of yeast that expired in 2007 so I was very worried that the yeast might not be active but the dough proved. But still! Anyway, I followed this direction on youtube exactly. Well almost exactly. I changed things here and there. Ah well.

Oh hell, I’ll just call it flat bread.

Edit (9-May-2009): I made some more for lunch today and the pictures are much prettier so I replaced the pictures with the ones from today. We ate it with fresh turkish bread rolls. Yummy.