Qeema

On Friday, I made Qeema, or ground meat. This is a very standard Muslim dish. I used the National Indian Association for Women's cookbook for guidelines, but made some small changes, as their recipe was very terse. The steps that go into this recipe are actually pretty standard to many Indian dishes. So it would be very instructive for me to provide a step-by-step account of what I did.

You will  need:
4 Medium Onions**
1 lb. ground meat.
Oil
3  tsp Coriander**
3.5 tsp Cumin**
1.5 tsp Chili Powder**
Salt
1.5 tsp ginger paste **                                                                  
1.5 tsp garlic paste**
Optional:
Whatever "hard' vegetables you want:
(e.g. potato, carrot, turnip)
Peas (frozen)
Some tomato.

**these are all things that you absolutely need to have if you want to cook almost anything Indian.

First, chop the onions and cook them in oil, in a large pot, until they completely caramelize. (The degree to which you cook the onions depends on where your dish is from, this is a Muslim dish, so cook the onions completely.)
Add the ginger and garlic paste, then the meat, and salt. Cover the pot and cook for about 15 minutes, until the meat is brown. Add the spices and "hard" vegetables, and the tomato if  you  elected to include that. Cook for another 6-7 minutes. Add water and then cook on a low heat setting. Add the frozen peas just a little bit before you stop cooking, you want enough time to thaw the peas and cook them a bit.

If this were any sort of curry, the steps would actually be quite similar, but you would add a large amount of water and/or tomato at some point to provide a liquid. (This is why this recipe is so instructive).

The result came out pretty well, the biggest issue was that I got impatient and did not caramelize the onions enough, but that was fairly minor.

Cooking the onions

Adding spices and vegetables

Finally complete!