Cooking together {featuring the Indian cuisine}

With one of my friends here I have this thing where we try to get together as often as possible to: cook. Than, life gets in the way, uni gets in the way, family and other friends...the list goes on and on, but we still manage to do it about once every other week. (Ok, and sometimes we also like to just head into the city and hit on the local ice cream shops and frozen yogurt places....buuut we still try our best ;)).
Anyway, just this week we managed to meet again in between our studying schedules and every time we do so, we normally try to go for something new. (Cooking for yourself somehow has the tendency to get quite monotonous. This is us learning and expanding our variety).

I had messaged her earlier this week with a list of things I was considering to cook number b) were spicy potato and pea parathas. She answered with "What are parathas?!". Needless to say we ended up making parathas.
So what are parathas?! Wikipedia said this: "a flatbread that originated in the Indian Subcontinent [...] Parantha is an amalgamation of the words parat and atta which literally means layers of cookeddough". (source)
(Also, I just noticed that Wikipedia spells them with an 'n'...the recipe didn't. So that's up for discussion).

If I would have to answer this question, I would say parathas are delicious flatbreads filled with spicy mush. Less intellectual I know. But look at this:

They were soft, and yummy. Spicy but sweet with the added chutney. They had just the right amount of flavour and the texture between the dough on the outside and the soft and chunky mush on the inside. In short: I loved them. And best of all: They really are easy to be make!!!!

Since my experience with the Indian cuisine doesn't go far when we talk about the cooking part, I will leave you with the original link (Katie at the kitchen door, spiced-potato-and-pea-parathas). Although, I changed a few things, so you'll find my changes here in between the pictures. Let's get rocking ;)

I started with the dough since the recipe wants to let it sit for 2 hours. I followed the recipe except that I simply used 2 cups whole wheat flour (no substitutional cup of any other flour). Easy peasy.

Next step: Prepare your filling!

While our potatoes were cooking, we threw together a quick salad.

And here come the changes I made:
They mainly happened because I didn't have everything on hand the recipe was asking for (ok close to nothing of it). So what I did was:
I still fried the onions with some olive oil in a pan. Than I added cumin, salt, curry, garam masala and simple semi hot mustard. And it tasted amazing!! (Though don't be afraid to add a lot of all of them. I kept adding and adding them simply because I normally just cook one-person-sized-meals and after all, those dishes live of their spices right?!) We kept sneaking bits and pieces of the potato mush while putting it into our flatbreads.

For the rest, we pretty much stuck to the recipe again. Which surprised us a bit was that the recipe had mentioned it would get quite messy so I was prepared to do a lot of cleaning afterwards. I wasn't!!!! The dough was super elastic and easy to handle. No big messes and filling spilling out!!!! (Added bonus!)

We served it with yogurt and mango chutney but I had the parathas cold with hummus the next day and that was just as delicious!!!

I hope I convinced you!!! Have fun in the kitchen ;)