Paratha

The other day, while investigating the possibility of buying goat meat at the halal market around the corner, I discovered something in the frozen food section that almost made me shout for joy and jump up and down. I was alone, so I didn’t; but I immediately got out my phone to broadcast my discovery in all caps: “PARATHA."

I have been searching for frozen paratha, passively and without much hope of success, for many years. It was a major part of my diet for a few months in middle school, when it appeared at Canned Foods, the grocery outlet that my mom shopped at almost exclusively. As I have alluded to before, good food was not always easy to find in our kitchen, and the contents of the fridge and cupboards was largely determined by what you could buy in quantities of 20 for a dollar. So, whatever we were eating any given month was determined by the whims of the Canned Foods management. And one month, they decided to bestow us with endless packages of frozen parathas.

Paratha is an Indian roti bread, thinner and more buttery than naan, and better suited for sweet preparations. The frozen kind are packaged as discs of dough separated by wax paper, and are heated in a frying pan for a few minutes until they reach golden, flaky perfection. Paratha can accompany any Indian stew or curry and is on the menu at a lot of Indian restaurants, but seems to get overlooked as people tend to be more familiar with naan. It is also commonly eaten with yogurt sauce and pickled chutneys, or simply slathered in butter. It can be a dessert as well – I’ve heard of people eating it with caramelized sugar and condensed milk, and it seems like a good idea to me.

My sister and I usually ate them plain or with copious amounts of butter, arguing during commercial breaks about whose turn it was to walk all the way to the stove to heat up the pan. These arguments often involved claims about complex hypotenuse theorems that aimed to prove that the other person was “closer” to the stove, even though we were sitting two feet apart on the same couch. I also remember eating it with honey and applesauce on some occasions, and when I heard about the Irish delicacy of fried candy bars, I wrapped a mini Caramello bar in a piece of paratha dough and pan-fried it. It was delicious.

Sadly, once paratha disappeared from Canned Foods, it disappeared from my life as well. Sure, I could get it at restaurants, and I have from time to time, but there’s nothing like the convenience of being able to fry up a hot paratha in your own home at a moment’s notice. Now that it’s available around the corner from my apartment, I can have it whenever I want, not just when the Canned Foods gods are feeling generous.

I ate the first paratha of my adult life with roasted curried cauliflower and a minted yogurt cucumber sauce. It was as good as I remembered: flaky in some areas, doughy and elastic in the more grease-saturated ones. There are two left in the packet, and my plans for them involve something sweet – if not a candy bar, then maybe some nutella.

Mint Cucumber Yogurt Sauce

1/3 of an English cucumber, grated or very thinly sliced and then chopped
the juice of two lemons
1/3 cup of thick plain yogurt
1 teaspoon chopped fresh mint
salt and pepper

Thin out the yogurt with the lemon juice, then add the rest of the ingredients. Adjust seasonings to taste, chill in the refridgerator.

Roasted Curried Cauliflower

florets from half a head of cauliflower
2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
salt

Mix curry powder and olive oil in a small bowl, then pour over the cauliflower in a baking dish. Sprinkle with salt and stir to coat. Bake at 400 degrees F for about 20-25 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender and beginning to brown.