Experimental Cookery 'Tuesday' #24: Vegetable Jalfrezi

Due to scheduling mix up, I found myself going from being triple-booked on Saturday afternoon to being at a loose end. Which provided a fine opportunity for me to steal a march of this week's Tuesday (which may be similarly busy). Hence this post.

For reasons unknown, I found it impossible for find the required jalfrezi paste for this recipe. I tried four different supermarkets, and while I was able to track down every other paste in the range, the jalfrezi eluded me. (I did take the opportunity to stock up on the others for later use.) In the end, therefore, I was forced to substitute, using a jalfrezi cook-in sauce that seemed about as close as I was going to get. In the end, I don't think it made much difference.

This meal was also a fine opportunity for me to break in my exciting new casserole dish, which was obviously hugely exciting. It is a sad comment on the state of my life that this represents the third most interesting thing to happen to me on Saturday. (The second most interesting was receiving a long-expected call from Juliet about the weeding of the year. As for the most interesting, well, watch this space...)

The meal itself cooked fairly easily, despite being fairly time consuming. Lots of chopping of vegetables, and then that long 45-minute simmer stage.

And when it came out... eh. Like so much vegetarian food, it was nice enough but rather lacking. I ended up with eight servings, seven of which are now in my freezer to be consumed at a later date. But, once those are done, I don't expect I'll be having this one again.
I'm going to call that 1-1.

The next entry in the book is "Leftover Curry Biryani". However, as this obviously requires a leftover curry as one of the ingredents, and as I don't really fancy using either the korma or the jalfrezi in this capacity, I am instead going to take the dangerous step of skipping this meal for a week. Instead, I shall move on to "Lamb Rogan Josh", and next week I shall use that to complete the biryani. Also, I still haven't had occasion to try any of the rice variants, nor the bhajis.