Vegetable Barley Soup with the Taste of Little India for French Fridays with Dorie

We truly enjoy being a part of the online food blogging community. We love having the opportunity to share recipes, tips, tricks, family traditions and stories about food and drink. Food is such a huge part of our lives. We are not the type of people who eat to live. Food is not just fuel for us. Rather, it is pleasure - not just the act of eating delicious food, but also the act of creating it and sharing it. It's how we experience other cultures. It's how we show our love and caring. And it's great to be in a "club" with others who feel that way.

That's why we joined French Fridays with Dorie, a group of cooks who all make the same recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table each week. Although we don't have the time to participate as often as we would like, this week we just had to find the time. It was a good week to do so, as the recipe was quite simple and easily made with a few basic kitchen ingredients. And also, because even though it's the end of March, it's still as cold and briskly windy as mid-January around here! So this week we, along with others around the world, made "Vegetable Barley Soup with the Taste of Little India," accented with such warming spices as garam masala, turmeric and red pepper. Perfect for this terrible weather!

We won't post Dorie's recipes here, as we'd rather encourage people to buy the book. The stories that go along with her recipes are entertaining, the pictures gorgeous, and it's a great big book filled with plenty of amazing recipes, making it well worth the cost. But this week, there's a loophole, in that Bill Daley of Tribune Newspapers did a feature on online cooking communities and in the feature, he included this very recipe. Here is the link to that article, and a longer version of the article can be found here. Bon appetit! 

Secret Recipe Club: Chicken Curry with Whole Spices

When we read about Amanda's (of Amanda's Cookin') Secret Recipe Club, we hoped we weren't too late to join. Well, we were. For that month's "meeting" anyway. But we were "inducted" into the club shortly afterward and are thrilled to be participating in July's posting.

The SRC is a group of food blogging enthusiasts who are assigned another person's blog from which they must read, choose, make and post about, a recipe. The "secret" part is that the person whose recipe we're making doesn't know who we are. All postings are posted at the same time on the same date (what we call the Big Reveal), and it's all great fun.

The blog we were assigned is Passionate About Baking. This beautifully written and photographed blog is by Deeba Rajpal of India. Now, one would think we would have chosen one of her many dozens of baking recipes. However, since it is our first SRC, we decided to celebrate "first timeness" and use Deeba's recipe for "Khade Masale Ka Korma," or "Chicken Curry with Whole Spices" to make our first homemade curry. This particular curry called to us not only because of the use of whole spices but also because of the wonderful simplicity of the dish.

The khade mesale, or whole spices used in this dish

We followed Deeba's recipe, found here, halving the amounts of the ingredients (since we were cooking for two), using Szechuan peppercorns in place of black, and serving the chicken with steamed basmati rice. The result was chicken that was cooked to a perfect texture in an aromatic curry sauce that had a flavorful and comforting spiciness to it. In a word, delightful.

The base of the dish, ghee (or clarified butter)

First, we melted some ghee...

...and sauteed sliced onions in it.

We added some green cardamom pods, whole cloves and Szechuan peppercorns.

Next, we added onion, garlic and ginger that we had ground quickly in a food processor.

This curry gets additional flavor as well as its color from hot paprika.

A few tablespoons of yogurt and some water were added before we put on the cover and allowed the chicken to cook.

The finished product, served with basmati rice.