Bombay potatoes

Mumbai aloo, by another name. YouTube videos show a whole range of approaches from the cop-out, shortcut, cheapskate versions, as here, using prepared hot curry paste which is nothing more than spices in oil, along with sweet chutney, which is like a concentration of spiced fruit preserves, to more involved techniques employing full arrays of various spices. They are either baked or cooked in a pan stovetop, use raw potatoes or pre-cooked potatoes. Some use tomatoes, some do not. Some cut the ingredients to bite-size pieces, some leave the vegetable ingredients whole. Some include garlic, other insist on avoiding it. Some use onion others use shallot. So what does all that tell you? 

It tells me the aim is to impart something hot and spicy and something else cool and sweet into potato and some kind of friendly allium of one's choice in any form of one's choice by cooking them together however one wishes or however one can. It tells me there is a broad range of ingredients, techniques, and outcomes.  

The bad thing about using these shortcut products is that someone else decides what goes into your aloo. The good thing about these shortcuts is that they are easy and they can be adjusted easily to suit your own taste. 

The curry paste and the mango chutney is mixed with the butter and oil. That combined messy mixture is tossed with the vegetables to coat. 

Baked at moderate heat for 40 minutes. Opened and checked. The potatoes were not quite done. Taste-tested a piece of potato. Deemed too weak. Another type of red curry paste was added to fortify, Thai red curry this time, a lot of it, almost the whole jar which is a small jar anyway. The other option is powdered Madras curry which was scooped from the spice bins at Whole Foods just to have on hand. The third option would be to load it up with my own primary spices of choice, my favorite things to give it a kick. 

All the other English speaking countries call this ↓ coriander. Americans call it cilantro, reserving coriander for the seeds of the same plant. 

Cilantro seeds -- coriander You can actually plant the coriander seeds that are purchased from the the spice aisle whole. They are as viable as seeds purchased from a seed catalog. They are the same thing. It may seem that your luck with them germinating is spotty. That is because the plant, cilantro or coriander whichever you call it, has evolved a defense mechanism that appears from the outside like careful good planning. Each little round coriander seed is actually two seeds. You will notice when the seeds germinate that two cilantro/coriander plants emerge from the same spot. It's fascinating! The two seeds-in-one are not perfectly hemispherical as you might imagine, rather, they are irregular odd little scrappy shapes. If you abrade the seeds, rub them roughly in your hands or between two layers of hard surfaces and break them apart to bits, then you will see all the protective material that surrounds the two irregular seeds and that form the tiny balls, and which delay germination for a season or two or three, thus spreading the risk of catastrophe which might befall the near-future generations of plants. Gardeners can buy the seeds already split so that they germinate reliably all at once. A problem with growing cilantro/coriander is that heat triggers the plant to bolt, so if the plants germinate during the summer heat then the plants grow up ready to bolt immediately, the crop grown in excessive heat never amounts to much other than baby bolting plants. The trick is to keep the plants cool. My source of information on this is by reading scores of online pages to find out why my seeds from various sources were so problematic, and from my own experience growing cilantro/coriander out on my balcony and in an Aerogarden. Believe me, it is a lot easier and cheaper to just keep buying it all the time in big bunches.