Pakistani Food Day

So, I spent this Sunday helping my friend Frankie Minore finish up his school project on Pakistan. He decided he wanted to round out his report with a sampling of Pakistani foods and a small cookbook, and came to me for some help. Since Frankie is twelve and has a rather limited knowledge of cooking, he enlisted my aid to find a few recipes he might like to use, and to prepare said recipes.

We chose two easy recipes, Potato Kebabs and an ice cream-like dessert called Kulfi, and two harder recipes, Seekh Kebabs and Kofta Biryani, to make. Potato Kebabs are simple to make, it’s pretty much just boiling pieces of potato and shoving them onto some skewers with some onions, then grilling them with some salt, pepper and oil. Kulfi was equally easy, most recipes I was able to find call for condensed milk, evaporated milk, and whipped cream as the base, and can be made in about five minutes. I decided that we would go the more traditional route and boil our milk down slowly, then add our ingredients and sugar at the end. So that left most of the work to be done on the Kofta Biryani, or spiced meatballs and rice, and the Seekh Kebabs, grilled spiced lamb on a stick.

Even with two easy recipes, the ingredient list for the other two dishes was pretty long, and we couldn’t find most of the spices without going to a specialty store, which is what we did. I must say that I really thought Seattle would have more Indian/Pakistani spice markets, but it just doesn’t. Outside seattle proper there are several, but in Seattle the three I was able to find were all on the north side of town. The two we ended up going to were House of Spice, a (very) small store inside of Cedars restaurant in the U-District, and Continental Spice and Halal Meats on 78th and Aurora.  I will definitely get all of my Indian/Pakistani spices from Continental Spice in the future, it was very clean, well stocked, and had everything we needed and so much more, which House of Spice unfortunately did not.