Indian dinner

For dinner last night I made some Indian dishes, some of them using ingredients from last weekend's farmer's market outing: counterclockwise from the bottom, lamb with spinach, okra with tomatoes, chutney, cucumber raita, dal, and in the center, basmati rice. Everything was good except for the lamb, which reminded me of a kosher goulash I had on a transcontinental flight in the 1980s. I bought stew meat from the farmer and although I cooked it low and slow for a good hour and a half, it was still the kind of meat you chew for thirty seconds and then discreetly spit into your napkin. But the spinach curry it cooked in was spicy-delicious, the okra was firm and tasty, the raita--what's not to like? The dal, a mush of red lentils, was leftover from lunch earlier in the week. The chutney was Patak's Major Grey, the best stuff on earth. In all, a fine meal. The best thing about Indian food is the spices, but the next best is having lots of different dishes with contrasting flavors, temperatures, textures, and colors.