Impromptu Indian Dinner

Before doing the grocery shopping on Sunday I always plan a full set of menus for the week. I find the discipline helpful; it certainly cuts down on wasted food, and it eliminates nightly dithering about what's for dinner. And yet it is still important to be flexible and willing to deviate from the plan. Tonight was supposed to be a porcini and cremini mushroom pasta, which is one of my old standard recipes, but somehow that just did not appeal. So instead I improvised some miscellaneous veggies (part of a head of cauliflower, a lone potato, some frozen peas, a carrot, an onion and garlic) along with some spices into a curry, and a quick consultation with 660 Curries gave me a vague roadmap to do something else with the mushrooms. A little adaptation yielded a very passable mushroom curry, fragrant with garlic, whole cumin, black cardamom seeds, a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf, the very last ripe tomato from the garden, some Punjabi garam masala, and a dash of Vulcan salt from the Spice House in Chicago. Some toasted papadum, yogurt, and chutney made the dinner complete. My only regret was that we didn't have any ginger on hand, but I still called dibs on the leftovers for lunch.

I'll figure something else out to do with the porcinis.