Indian Potatoes with Onion and Tomatoes

Here is another pre-Thanksgiving guest post by Dana at The Kitchen Witch. She is a wonderful writer, always sprinkling her posts with humor and her recipes with deliciousness. Read her post and check out her blog, you'll know what I am talking about, and you will not be disappointed.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!



The first time my (now) mother-in-law tried to teach me to cook Indian food, I was pretty intimidated. I mean, I’d eaten Indian food maybe five times in my life, and although I liked it, I wasn’t sure about cooking it myself. Cooking it myself involved buying a spice grinder, for chrissakes—I am Convenience Queen, here. Purchasing a spice grinder really isn’t something on my radar.

I was also unsettled because, well, I hate to stereotype, but Indian mothers are intimidating. The sun rises and the moon sets on an Indian mama’s son, and if you happen to be the girl so blessedly lucky to date him…well, you’d better measure up. And I sort of was failing already because I wasn’t The Nice Indian Girl They’d Been Hoping For.

Don’t get me wrong—she was cordial—but I was sort of a wreck.

I saw all of the jars of spices and the cloves of garlic and the fresh gingerroot and the industrial sized bag of Basmati and I started sweating. Convenience Queen was WAY outta her league.

Plus, she didn’t use a recipe for ANYthing. I watched, amazed, as she rattled off the different spices involved, tossed them into various pans, sweated onions, added chiles by the fistful. And when it was done, she smiled broadly at me and said, “See? It’s easy.”

After that little lesson, Convenience Queen went to Barnes and Noble and found herself a cookbook.

But even THAT wasn’t simple. When you have a big-ass country like India, people cook by region; North Indian cuisine is quite different from South Indian cuisine, and folks in Kerala cook differently from those in Bombay. You get the idea.

My husband’s family hails from Hyderabad, in Southern India. South Indian food is heavily spiced and often vegetarian. I decided to purchase a cookbook titled Curried Favors: Family Recipes from South India by Maya Kaimal MacMillan. The recipes sounded at least somewhat accessible, the photos were lovely, and there was quite a bit of information about Indian food and how it differs by region. And the big blue ribbon on the front declaring that the book was a Julia Child Award winner certainly didn’t hurt.

The first recipe I tried from the book was a simple potato dish. The result was a gorgeous, pink-hued curry, spicy and fragrant, lush with coconut milk. The potato dish, and all resulting recipes I’ve made from this cookbook, was a home-run.



Potatoes and Onions with Tomatoes*
(serves 6-8)

1 cup thinly sliced onion

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon minced garlic

Spice mixture:

5 teaspoons ground coriander

¼ teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)

¼ teaspoon ground black pepper

¼ teaspoon ground turmeric

1 ½ cups chopped tomatoes, fresh or canned, drained


3 medium boiling potatoes, peeled and cut into ¾-inch cubes (about 3 cups)

¾ cup water

½ cup canned unsweetened coconut milk

1 teaspoon fennel seeds, coarsely ground with a mortar and pestle**

1 teaspoon salt


¼ cup canned unsweetened coconut milk


¼ teaspoon mustard seeds

10 curry leaves or 2 bay leaves

1 dried red pepper, crumbled

1 tablespoon vegetable oil


In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, fry onion in 2 tablespoons oil until edges are nicely browned. Add garlic and stir for 1 minute. Stir in spice mixture and tomatoes and fry until tomato pieces become soft.


Add potatoes, water, ½ cup coconut milk, fennel seeds and salt and bring to a boil. Turn heat down and simmer, partially covered, until potatoes are tender and liquid is reduced, about 20 minutes.


Add ¼ cup coconut milk, bring to a boil, and remove from heat. Consistency should be moderately thick. Taste for salt.


In a small covered frying pan over medium-high heat, heat mustard seeds, curry/bay leaves, and dried red pepper in 1 tablespoon oil until mustard seeds begin to pop. Pour contents of pan into potato curry and stir.


These potatoes are great by themselves with poori or naan, or as an accompaniment to rice and other curries.


** And NO, I didn’t go out and buy a freaking mortar and pestle!!! I used my handy-dandy, newly purchased spice grinder to crush the fennel seeds.