What's For Dinner? Yellow Vegetable Chick Pea Curry

I have decided I am going to make food posts a regular thing on my blog. Up until now I have just thrown in random posts if I made something particularly exciting, but I love talking about food about as much as I enjoy makeup, so why not? A warning before we dive in though: I rarely use a proper recipe or measure things out when I am cooking. I will often find an inspiration recipe and then do my own version of it using what I have. Even when I set out to follow a recipe, I can never seem to stick to it. For this reason, I won't always have a full recipe to give you, so people who need serious step by step instructions for cooking might not like this so much. I will try to start writing down what I do as I do it, but no guarantees!

Today's dinner came about because cans of full fat coconut milk were on sale for 98c at the grocery store yesterday, so I grabbed a whole pile of them. There are so many awesome things you can do with this stuff (coconut ice cream, coconut whipped cream, tons of sauces, etc)! One of my favourite recipes with coconut milk though is coconut rice. This one I do have a recipe for too!

Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups long grain rice (I used basmati)
- vegetable oil
- 1 can coconut milk (you can use low fat for this one)
- Approx. 2 cups water
- Salt, cumin, coriander

Instructions:
- Rinse the rice and put it in a tall pot
- Add a small drizzle of oil and toast the rice at a very low heat for a few minutes, stirring so nothing burns
- Add the can of coconut milk and enough water that the total liquid equals 3 cups
- Add a pinch of salt, cumin and coriander to the pot, cover and bring to a boil
- Once boiling, immediately reduce to a low simmer keeping the lid on the pot
- Simmer for about 15 minutes until there is no liquid left

This recipe does make a lot of rice, so make sure you use a big enough and tall enough pot!

Now for the curry that I made! This is a chickpea and vegetable curry that also uses coconut cream so even vegans can enjoy this one!

Getting everything ready to cook! I added a few things later as I went like eggplant. (haha, you can see my Sodastream stuff in the background, thanks tiny kitchen!)

Ingredients:
- 1 can chick peas
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 sweet potato, diced
- about 1/3 of a cauliflower, cut into small florets
- 1/2 eggplant, diced
- vegetable stock
- 1 can full fat coconut milk
- About 4 large garlic cloves
- Fresh ginger
- Chili paste
- Yellow curry powder
- Ground Cumin
- Ground Coriander
- Lemon juice
- salt, pepper - Couple tablespoons or so of a really lean, blonde roux (Google it if you have to! I just hate putting straight flour into a sauce to thicken it, I can taste the flour that way, yuck!)

Like I said, I am really bad at measuring things, so you can just guess all that!

I browned all the veggies slightly in a pot with some oil, added all the spices and let it cook another minute so the spices got all toasty, then added the liquids and let it cook until everything was tender. It should look kinda like this:

Once everything is cooked through, simply put some rice in a bowl and top it with the curry mixture!

That's it for the pseudo-recipe!

If you think I should make this a regular thing, let me know. Or alternately, if you see no point in me doing this if I can't provide a proper recipe also let me know. I could just post a lot of food pictures and not bother doing this half recipe stuff too. Any input would be really helpful!