Aloo Paratha mission: Jee to the recue..

My cooking expedition started yesterday evening when Jee expressed the desire to eat some aloo paratha while we were discussing our dinner plans at tea time. We usually have regular roti/paratha for dinner. In past I had tried different kinds of parathas (spinach, beetroot, cauliflower) but aloo paratha remained one domain that I never tried. Actually all the kind of parathas I make are the ones where you can just add the ingredients right into your wheat floor, knead it and go forward. This is the easy style of making paratha if you ask me. Aloo paratha/cauliflower paratha are different, as one needs to make balls of the filling and roll it inside the chapathi dough and make flat round parathas (note: map shapes not allowed, if you want to make the authentic kind).

I was determined this time to make authentic aloo parathas and so after tea I started googling on how to make aloo paratha. These days I have started having more faith in young guns (newly married girls who google just like me to find recipes) venturing out cooking and writing blogs on the whole experience, in past when I used to google for any recipe I used to strictly trust ladies whose names sounded like ammachis/amoomas (Grandma in mallu) like a Mariamma or Thresiamma. Somehow it showed the years or experience and credibility. Anyways, I found this interesting blog site http://mykitchenantics.blogspot.com/ written by a mallu girl from London. The highlight of this post about aloo paratha was that she had even taken pictures of each step and the instructions were pretty easy at least when I read it. The aloo parathas stacked with a dollop of butter on top in the blog looked damn yummy.

After reading the blog I became more confident that I could nail this aloo paratha adventure this time. Jee was also super happy and came to inspect the progress every now and then. When I see him roaming near kitchen I know he is hungry and looking for food...reminds me of that song from an old show I used to watch..."pet mein chuhe kood rahen hai, cho cho chi chi bol rahein hain...". Means there are squeaky mouses playing around in my tummy. 

Back in kitchen I was busy collecting all the ingredients. Since I could sense the urgency in both Jee and Rhea, I hurried through the process and instead of dicing onions myself I decided to put it in the small chopper I have. The onion chopped fine but was a bit watery which I knew is going to create problems but then there was no time to fix the problem, I had two hungry people breathing down my neck !! 

Anyways I mixed all the filling ingredients and instantly knew there is something wrong as it looked like it had a loose consistency than the pictures in the blog. My worst fear came true when I started rolling the paratha with the filling ball inside, it started to break. It might be also because of the kind of potato that we were using. There so many varieties of potatoes available at the grocery store that I get confused all the time. It was so late for dinner and I was getting no where near the target. I was so pissed off with this that I started mumbling "see this is why I don't try these things here...hmm he wants aloo paratha for dinner..." etc etc.

Jee, who is much calmer than a 'jumpy me', came rushing to help. He suggested I  knead the filling with some wheat floor and make the regular parathas like I am used to making. So I started kneeding the filling with some floor and also ranting about why I shouldn't have started making these wretched things. In about 5 minutes I had a gooey but somewhat okay dough.  The authentic style aloo paratha was out of question now. I started rolling those gooey dough balls in to map shaped parathas as it was too sticky to roll. My expedition was falling apart, Rhea was getting impatient for dinner too. 

After making 2-3 of those map shaped parathas we gave our little daughter her dinner. Even though the parathas were shaped funny, they turned out to be very good taste wise.  The disaster recovery Jee planned turned out to be good and we managed to finish off most of the parathas with some yogurt and chili pickle. Yum...maybe it was also 'coz we were so hungry by the time it was done that it tasted like heaven. Overall it turned out great as the same was served for breakfast and devoured out fast enough.

Map shaped aloo paratha..

My brother who lives in Hyderabad tells me that his wife makes amazing aloo parathas. This time when I am visiting them I'll ask her to show me how to make those authentic kinds.