Hi everyone,
This weekend is the beginning of the Indian feast of Diwali otherwise known as the Festival of Lights.

To that end I invited a friend of mine over for dinner for an easy to make Indian dinner. My background isn’t east Indian and I am not a great cook of a wide variety of Indian sauces, so I used three different Indian sauces from Sharwood. I had used one a few weeks back and wrote about it on this blog. See that page here.

This time I wanted a variety of dishes. Here’s the menu:
Shrimp Korma
Butter Chicken
Roasted Vegetables with Balti sauce
Basmati rice
Nan bread

I had a Sharwood’s Korma sauce and simply added 1 pound of cooked shrimp to it and heated it for about 10 minutes. One dish done!

The chicken was about as quick. As I boiled the rice I sauteed 4 chicken breasts which I had cut into bite size pieces. I added the cooked chicken to the Butter Chicken sauce and heated it for 10 or 15 minutes. Another dish done.

As all of this was happening, I roasted pieces of cut cauliflower (a very commonly used Indian vegetable) and diced sweet potato with a very little bit of oil to keep it from drying out. After roasting the veggies for about 1/2 an hour I mixed it with the Sharwoods Balti sauce and again, just heated it together for 10 or 15 minutes.

By the time the rice was ready all the other dishes were cooked and ready to go. It was great! I do like Indian food but I must say these are the best I have had.

I think my favorites were the Korma sauce and the Tikka Masala I used a few weeks ago. The Butter Chicken sauce was good, but not my favorite. The Balti sauce blended well with the roasted cauliflower. which seemed to soak it up quite nicely.

My friend and I ate like princesses and were quite happily stuffed at the end of the meal. I have lots left over. Each sauce really does make quite a bit. I gave Daarla a meal for her husband and still had a couple of meals leftover for myself. I love Indian food leftovers!

I said it a few weeks ago when I first used the Sharwoods sauces and I will say it again. These sauces are really good! I don’t know if I will bother learning to make them when opening a jar of REAL Indian sauce was so easy.

Anyway, just wanted to share that.

To everyone who celebrates Diwali, happy festival.

Karen