Onion Masala Manicotti Pasta Recipe (+Giveaway)

I came up with this new dish after I received masala marinara pasta sauce from our friend Dave of DavesGourmet.com. This special sauce was the winner of the Sofi Award for outstanding pasta sauce in 2010. The sauce is very creative and definitely has a South Asian flair with hints of ginger, coconut and kaffir lime leaves. It's a must try.

Since the sauce itself is a fusion of cultures, I thought it would be fun to continue the theme and make an Italian pasta dish with Indian flavors. I made Indian-style pearl onions cooked in onion masala sauce, called dopiaza. I used that mixture to flavor manicotti stuffed with ricotta cheese and a generous helping of French triple cream cheese. If that sounds a bit decadent to you, well, it is!

If you're itching to try the sauce I used in this dish, Dave's Gourmet kindly agreed to be a part of our 25 days of giveaways. For a chance at winning, just go to our 25 Days of Giveaways page and enter. We'll announce the winner tomorrow!

Make sure you're a fan of PhamFatale Facebook fan page and Dave's Gourmet or follow @Phamfatalecom and tweet about this giveaway. To make it easy, you can just copy and paste this tweet if you’d like: "Dave's Gourmet Pasta Sauce #HolidayGiveaway from @Phamfatalecom and @DavesGourmet: http://bit.ly/vVk4L8".

Korma Curry Recipe: Goat Meat with Okra

Goat korma with okra is a spicy Indian curry dish. We usually serve it when my husband Lulu's family comes over for dinner as the rest of his family isn't vegetarian. To the Western palate, goat meat and okra wouldn't be an obvious choice of ingredients but they're very complementary.

To certain people, goat meat can have a strong taste, but I find that the meat at my local Indian market tastes wonderful and is very tender. Okra has a bad reputation as well due to its texture once boiled. I personally love this dish and could eat it by the pound, dipping rotis (Indian flat bread) in the spicy gravy sauce. At the very least, it’s a dish that will broaden your horizons.

Paneer Butter Masala Recipe

Paneer butter masala probably isn't the healthiest vegetarian dish out there, but it is surely delicious. Pretty much anything with butter in the title is a recipe for success. I remember a restaurant reviewer once saying that given enough butter and cream, sand can taste great. That may be a bit of a stretch, but when you layer this sauce over gently fried Indian cheese, it’s impossible to resist.

The sauce consists of a blend of butter, heavy cream, tomato sauce, lime juice, almond flour and a few other Indian spices. To that, fried cubes of paneer (Indian cheese) are added and simmered. You could always substitute fried tofu for the paneer, but I think it's better to go all out in the calorie department if you’re going to make this dish!

Paneer Korma Recipe

In Urdu, shahi paneer korma would literally translate to braised paneer in "royal" curry. Shahi means royal but when it refers to paneer, it usually indicates a creamy, decadent tomato sauce.

To make the dish I started by quickly stir-frying cubes of paneer. Paneer is Indian-style soft cheese. I made the sauce with caramelized onion paste, yogurt, tomatoes, ginger garlic paste as well as several Indian spices. The paneer pieces are braised at a simmer in the curry sauce until well coated. The final touch is a little heavy cream. It’s not something you want to eat every day, but paneer korma is a perfect dish to make when you want to treat yourself.

Taro Root Korma Recipe

Taro korma is an Indian vegetable curry. The spicy gravy contains fried onion paste and yogurt and is flavored with ginger-garlic paste as well as several Indian spices. Taro pieces are fried till crispy, and then finish cooking in the curry paste. Taro is a very starchy ingredient that makes the gravy a lot thicker and denser when added.

Kormas can be either vegetarian or "non-veg" with any assortment of vegetables, fried cheese such as paneer, or meat such as goat korma. I came up with this dish for a very simple reason: there was a basket full of taro waiting to be cooked!  Taro root usually doesn’t keep for more than a week, and it will turn sour when it's mixed and stored in the freezer. Buy it close to when you’re ready to cook, and enjoy it. It’s definitely worth the effort.