The Traditional Fish Curry

While my 'other half' is more excited about trying her hands at multi-cultural continental cuisine, I stick to honing my skills on the home-grown ones. Not that I don't like 'her kind' of cuisine (I do! what will all that cheese, shrimp, ham and the like), but I enjoy cooking 'my kind' more, since it feels quite empowering being able to handle 'n' types of spices and 'm' kinds of oils patiently and coming up with something finger-lickin' good!

So, the weekend gone by I felt like having the good-ol' fish curry that my mom cooked back home when I was a kid. Now, I am not an avid blogger (as you might have guessed; this is my first post!..even though Sashimi keeps mentioning me here and there in her antics), so I forgot to take pictures while I was cooking. I'll try to be more considerate next time ;).

I'll keep it short (I personally find ramblings very boring unless there are images/pictures/visuals to support the content). The fish of interest is Rohu (no idea what's the common name though scientific taxonomy attributes it to "Labeo Rohita"..thanks there, Wiki!). People in northern and eastern part of my country are quite fond of it.

So, I took a fistful of mustard seeds and garlic bulbs (or pods? or buds?..what's it called, dammit?!) and centrifuged them in my grinder with a little water. I added some red chilli powder, pepper, turmeric and salt in the resulting paste. That takes care of phase one. Oh, I forgot to mention that I had cleaned up the sliced rohu and kept it in refrigerator earlier, so technically this mustard business is in phase two.

A little mustard paste is smeared on the fish slices and shallow-fried (umm..well, you can deep fry it and have it just like that..it tastes yum!! but that deserves a separate blog entry, so we will proceed). Meanwhile I had heated up some oil (ok, this needs mention: "oil" everywhere in this post means "mustard oil", any other will ruin the stuff!) in another pan with a li'l bit o' fenugreek. The mustard paste is deep-fried in it till it turns golden-brown, at which point I diced a tomato in it. Well then, the deal is almost over; you put the fried fish in the mixture, add a little water, salt it up a bit, leave for 5 mins and you are ready to rock! We usually relish it with freshly-cooked steamed rice. Feel free to experiment and add you own touch!