How I make 12 Indian Inspired Meals for $25

the goal of this series is to save you a ton of money in the kitchen and the concept is pretty simple I'm going to be picking one cuisine in this case Indian food and then I'll pick 10 Common ingredients that I think represent that Cuisine well and all of these ingredients together add up to under 25 in cost and then I'll take these ingredients and really see how far I can possibly push them so using all of my cooking skills and most importantly a ton of creativity to really see how many Indian inspired dishes I can make for under 25 dollars now of course India is a massive country there's no possible way to pick 10 ingredients that represents a place with over a billion people but what I tried to do was one pick ingredients that were all very inexpensive number two pick things that anyone could find at any store so you're not going to see a lot of specialty ingredients in this list and number three pick ingredients that show up in a lot of the Indian dishes that I've cooked over the years so 4 for the produce the fresh ingredients I'm going with two small to medium onions you can sub in any onion here and it will work fine one bunch of cilantro one pound of potatoes any size will work because ultimately they're just going to be sliced up anyway and for the aromatics this is kind of a cheat but I'm counting ginger and garlic as one ingredient mainly because these are going to get combined together as one thing in just a second now for the pantry ingredients I have one 32 ounce can of tomatoes these are canned or Jarred for my garden but of course any type of canned tomatoes will work fine and then one pound of jasmine rice one pound of dried chickpeas it's very important that they're dry and then one can of whole fat coconut milk and for the protein maybe the most versatile cut of all I'm using 1.5 pounds of chicken thighs with the skin on and the bone in which is very important because we're going to be taking advantage of both of those things and obviously you need a ton of spices for Indian food but we only have one ingredient left so so I'm just using some garam masala any Indian spice mix is good but the cardamom the cinnamon the cloves the cumin these are the things I'm using anyway in my Indian Cuisine so just combined all in one jar is going to get the job done and I'm filming this after the fact and I only use that much spice right there so that's probably about 50 cents total and there's three ingredients that I won't be counting on this list that everyone already has in their Pantry we've got ghee or you can replace that with butter no problem some type of neutral oil I have a grapeseed oil right here and finally of course we need salt to season our food all right before I start banging out meals there are four things that I do need to prep to just get me in a much better place and number one is ginger garlic paste which is a must-have for Indian Cuisine and it's really simple to make I'm gonna peel all of the garlic that I have so the entire head then I'm gonna peel all of the ginger that I had I figured I would just use everything and then you just have to grind it up I'm actually using my spice grinder which comes with a blending attachment and these things are fantastic I would love one of those Indian specialty Curry blenders or whatever they are but they're pretty expensive so this tiny little spice grinder gets the job done and it's like twenty dollars so I'll just throw everything in there and grind it up and I just kind of give it a shaky shake just to make sure everything comes together well and once that's Blended pretty smooth that's your ginger garlic paste which is just the most genius invention now that I had this I don't have to worry about chopping up Ginger or garlic at any point and it really makes up the foundation of flavor for 70 of Indian meals so this is super valuable next up I'm going to be prepping the chicken thigh and to get maximum value out of these thighs I'm going to first debone them I'll trim off any fat any cartilage and I'll just Reserve that to the side and then I'll give the chicken a salt and just pop that on a plate throw that in the fridge to dry brine overnight which is basically seasoning it and giving it a slight cure then I'll take the bones I'll add them to a pot and the only other flavor that I could scrape up from these ingredients was the end of these onions right here which I won't need so I just cut the ends off added them and the onion skin to the pot covered it with water popped it in my slow cooker overnight and boom you've got an instantaneous chicken stock which is always going to be super valuable to add flavor to your dishes next up for the prep I wanted to make a fermented dose of batter because I have all these dry goods and I figured it'd be a good way to switch it up rather than just cooking them so of course I'm going to be using that Jasmine rice I'm taking about nine ounces of of this and since I don't have any lentils or dial which is the other traditional ingredient in a Dosa batter I figured I would just use some of the chickpeas and I didn't want to overwhelm the flavor with chickpea so I'm just using a few ounces here and I'll just cover that with water and let that soak overnight until they are fully hydrated and then I strain them off added them to a high powered blender with about one tablespoon of salt and then I blended everything up adding just enough water to really bring everything together with the goal of creating a nice smooth batter and then I poured the batter into a bowl covered it with a clean towel and just let the fermentation process happen it's gonna take at least a day to start but ultimately you can go for a few days and I will use this dose of batter once things start activating and I get some of those nice fermented flavors in my Dosa batter and I figured I would soak the rest of those chickpeas because dried chickpeas are absolutely good for nothing so I just soaked them overnight and I will figure out how to use them later now the final thing I'm prepping is a Chutney which is super crucial for Indian Cuisine basically a side flavor bomb to use in the curries that I'll be making shortly and since I had all of this cilantro I figured I would make a cilantro-based Chutney because I could take advantage of the stems from the cilantro and just save all of the leaves for garnish so I'm going to use that same spice grinder I'm gonna add in the cilantro stems a little hit of that ginger garlic paste already coming in handy a hit of some of that garam masala a Sprinkle of salt and then finally some coconut milk and I just took the coconut milk out of the can and just mixed that up to incorporate the cream together so I can easily ration it off and when I started blending everything up I did need a little bit of water to get the right consistency and boom this thing was looking great of course not a traditional cilantro chutney because I don't have all the proper ingredients but this will certainly do the trick all right we are done the prep and it's time to start cranking out meals and the first thing thing I'm going to make of course is a curry actually a lot of these meals are going to be curries because Curry is one of the easiest ways to really extend ingredients like if you don't have much you can make something super flavorful that will produce a lot of food which is kind of the whole goal of this video so since the Dosa batter needs another data for men I figured I would just cook off the rest of the Jasmine rice that I had to serve with the curry so I just washed the rice popped it in the rice cooker set it forget it moving on now since we are limited on our ingredients it becomes even more important to nail down those base Indian techniques so all of these meals are going to be pretty simple but that's generally the way I cook just kind of focusing on building those layers of flavor so first I'm going to make a chicken coconut curry now I'm using a wok here but you can use any pan that will fit a few servings and I've got my chicken thigh that you can see is nice and dried out a little bit cured I'm gonna actually cut the pieces in half so I can use half now for this Curry and half for another one later on and I'll get that frying until it's nice and crispy I don't need any oil here because this is a non-stick pan and that chicken will pretty quickly start rendering off a bunch of fat to cook in and then while that's cooking I'm going to slice up one of the two medium onions that I have and then when that chicken skin is nice and crispy I'll flip it and cook it on the other side for just a few minutes and just keep flipping it until all of the sides are crispy and the chicken is pretty much cooked through we will be cooking this later on in the curry then I'll remove the chicken from the pan I'm gonna add just a little bit of ghee here for some extra fat and also a ton of extra flavor and then I'll start frying up these onions for about three minutes until they're browned and then I'm gonna go in with that ginger garlic paste and start frying that up as well you really want to cook this down as well to caramelize those flavors and tone them down a bit and then after about two minutes I'm gonna sprinkle in some of that garam masala and just toast that in the pan with all the aromatics for about another minute so this isn't a proper tempering but the goal here is just to toast all of that spice really start to cook down the ginger garlic paste and we are building of course the foundation of flavor for this Curry then I'm going to add in half a jar of my tomatoes oh yeah cook those down for a few minutes add in about half of the coconut milk I have left and just let that cook and bubble away and reduce so I let the curry cook down for about 10 minutes just simmering away until it really started to thicken up and in the meantime I chopped up the chicken and for some reason I forgot the film actually adding the chicken back into the curry but I added all of the chicken in there and just cooked it down for another two minutes until it was the consistency that I was looking for and that chicken was completely tender and cooked through and then served this up with a side of that Jasmine rice and just a little garnish of some of that fresh cilantro and I ended up getting three meals out of this Curry and about half of the cooked rice so now I want to focus on those soaked chickpeas which I did not forget about and I have a ton of them which I figure I can use some for a curry but definitely not all of them I need to figure out how to offload like two-thirds of these and the best thing I could think of was actually Falafel which is certainly not Indian but why not take the Falafel concept and technique and just use the Indian ingredients that I have and see what happens and that's exactly what I'm gonna do so I'm taking about two-thirds of these soaked chickpeas I'm going to drain them off and get them bone dry I'll dump them into a food processor I'm going to add about a third of the last onion that I have a little bit of that ginger garlic paste and then I have a ton of coriander that I can add as well to really give these a nice fresh punch and also add a nice coloring as well and I'm just going to pulse them up until I get a texture that looks just like this right here now if you follow my airfryer videos you know my favorite way to cook falafel is in the air fryer but since these are Indian falafels I really just wanted to experiment to see what they would taste like if you cooked them purely in ghee so I got a pan on a medium heat added in a good bit of ghee and just scoop them out with a spoon just kind of flatten them a bit and started frying them on both sides and you can see right here why I like cooking them in an air fryer because they just absorb so much fat which is not always ideal but in this case I know they won't be dry and they'll be super flavorful and I'm not really sure how to use these falafels so I figured I would just package them up and save them for later all right moving on and you know what's ready that dose of batter it's been fermenting for about two days you can see as I mix through this it is a bit thick right now I probably could have thinned it out a little bit more before but that's totally fine I'm just going to add some water until I get a consistency that's much better for a pancake and now rather than making the more traditional standard Dosa that you might be used to if you've had a Dosa before where you spread it out super thin on a griddle and roll it up I don't have time for that or really the skill to do that I'm going to be doing more of the pancake style or the uh how do you say it out of them other Palm style so I'll preheat My Pan to a medium high heat I'll add in a little bit of ghee and I'll just start pouring that batter over as evenly as possible until it covers the bottom surface and then just fry that for about three minutes until it gets nice and crispy and then just flip it over and fry it up crispy on the other side [Music] all right now that we have those doses fried up and ready to eat I'm definitely moving on to Curry number two of this video which is going to be a play off of chana masala chickpea style Curry since I have about a third left of those hydrated chickpeas now the first thing I'm going to do is chop up half of the potatoes that I have so the main components of this Curry are going to be chickpea and potatoes and I'll get those potatoes just frying up in some oil until they're nice and crispy and in the meantime I'll take that last piece of onion that I have and slice it up and with these potatoes they don't have to be perfectly cooked through since we're cooking them down in the curry but you just want some of that nice Browning which you can see here these are ready to go I'm going to take them out of the pot and then the next steps looked exactly like the last Curry I'm gonna Brown The Onion add the ginger garlic paste add that garam masala until everything's nice and toasted hit it with the tomatoes but here's where things take a little bit of a shift rather than adding that coconut milk I'm going to take some of that chicken stock add that to the curry and then I'll add in all of those chickpeas I'll add in the potatoes and I'll just cook that down for what took about 45 minutes to an hour until those chickpeas were nice and tender and the potato not only Cooks through but the starch really thickens up that Curry and you just get this incredible consistency that I served up with the Dosa a little bit of that Chutney and this ended up being four meals total I ran out of Dosa pretty quick but then I was able to turn it into another meal with a little bit of that leftover cooked rice all right this is where things get a little wacky when you're running low in ingredients but also some of the most creative dishes come out of these moments it's all about just releasing all attachment of anything you've ever known about cooking pushing all judgment aside and just really using up what you have to make a meal so in this case I still had half of that chicken left over that was already seasoned and ready to go so I'm gonna start frying that up and while that's getting crispy I'll slice up the rest of the potatoes that I have and once the chicken's nice and crispy I'm gonna remove it and just use all of that rendered chicken fat from the skin to cook the potatoes until they're crispy for around five minutes cooking on a medium high heat now I'm going to remove the potatoes and since they absorbed all of that fat I'll add a little bit of ghee and I'll sprinkle in some of that garam masala straight to the pan to toast up for just about 30 seconds which requires full attention and constant movement to avoid burning and now that this is super fragrant I'm gonna add the rest of the coconut milk in and just reduce that which is going to caramelize it a bit to add another layer of flavor almost similar to making a Thai style Curry and then after three minutes when it's nice and reduced I'm going in with a little bit of that cilantro chutney because that's really the only flavor I have at this point and trust me I know green and brown don't mix together for a very pleasant color but again it's not about beauty at this point it's just making something that tastes good and now that this is reduced for about three minutes I'm gonna add in the chicken and potatoes and just cook everything together for a few more minutes which I'll serve over some rice okay and I'll say that this is definitely my least favorite Curry out of the three that I made today but it certainly worked in getting rid of all those leftovers and it got me a good three meals so obviously I have to still use those falafel but all that's left in my pantry of ingredients at this point is a little bit of chicken stock some rice and half of a small potato comment in below if you think you can turn that into a meal with a falafel but for me wasn't gonna happen and also it's been a lot of starch you know I'm craving some fresh elements at this point so what I ended up doing is just taking those falafels and making a bunch of fresh salads with them which worked out so well the ghee flavored Indian Falafel was perfect as a little crispy element in a salad and I think I made six salads total so obviously I'm not counting those as full meals so I figured I would give myself two meals out of the six salads that I made bringing the grand total of meals to 12. but I think that a point here is that knowing how to cook being able to break free of recipes and get creative with what you have ultimately you're saving money that is one of the main tenets of being a pro-home cook and what I'm always trying to really push on you is that you have to break free of recipes if you want to maximize in the kitchen it's just a must there's no way around it and let me know Below in the comments if you like this type of video and if there's another Cuisine you want to see me try in this series and that's about it

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 372,660

Keywords: budget meals, cooking on budget, 25 dollars, save money in kitchen, indian meals, easy curry, easy Indian curry, channa masala, cilantro chutney, basic ingredients, cheap meals, common ingredients, coconut curry, Indian ideas, indian curries, beginner curry, beginner Indian food

Id: HQvNKbDU2wA

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023