Indian Italian Food

This weekend I invited some friends over for dinner. I wanted to make something I hadn't made before and ended up deciding on a yellow curry pasta. Apparently this sounds good to no one else in the world but me. Everyone I mentioned this to gave me a look or repeated back to me in question form "Yellow curry pasta?" I even scoured the Food Network site looking for some kind of guidance and there was nothing.

But that didn't stop me.

Yellow curry has a sweet flavor to it, it really isn't all that spicy. I figured by adding some coconut milk and cream I could make a pasta sauce. I decided to saute red and green bell peppers, mushrooms, purple onion, red potatoes, and zucchini. I had originally debated adding some other things like pineapple, coconut, shaved almonds, and golden raisins but I didn't want to make things too busy. And since this was the first time I was attempting this I figured I'd stay close to traditional curry vegetables. I also sauteed shrimp separately to add to the pasta.

The pasta I used was rigatoni. I didn't think any long pasta was really appropriate and I didn't want anything too textured because I figured a curry pasta sauce was going to be somewhat intense as is and I didn't need a pasta that would pick up more sauce than necessary. I also sauteed the veggies in just a touch of plain olive oil and the shrimp in just a bit of olive oil and some salt and pepper. I didn't want to alter the flavor of the curry much and I obviously didn't think the dish was going to be lacking in flavor.

To sort of cut any heat of the curry I decided to make a very "cool" salad. I cut up cucumber and honeydew melon and mixed them with some sour cream, dill, salt, and pepper.

I was super busy trying to make dinner and talk with friends and make sure everyone had what they needed but I did manage to take some photos.


This was a tray of appetizers I made. There's lots of naan with roasted red pepper hummus, jalapeno hummus, paneer (an Indian cheese), red plums, cream cheese, and mango chutney.


This is my yellow curry sauce after the cream and coconut milk had been added.


I was a little hesitant to saute all the veggies together since typically things cook at different times but I was sort of in a hurry to feed everyone so I decided to be a rebel. I ended up doing just the onions separately and the vegetables were fine.


This is pretty self explanatory.


This is my salad. It was really delicious but I didn't account for the water content of the cucumber and melon. I think if I did it again I would use slightly less sour cream because it ended up a little too wet. But dill and salt with honeydew...divine.


And here's the finished product. I can't wait to make this again and try it with different curries. Also, can I just say how much I love those teal glasses? They're from IKEA and they make the most perfect cocktail glasses, water glasses, and serving vessels for sides.