Some people in the US stock an arsenal of ammunition for their large gun collections. Since we neither own guns or ammunition, we have plenty of room for an excessive amount of spices.
Shocked at the prices of organic spices ($54/lb for organic premium cardamom pods????) we try to "save" by buying bulk. We do go through them fairly fast, or so it seems at the prices we pay. To grind, we use either our granite grinding stone, Sumeet Asian kitchen machine, small coffee ginder, or Vitamix, depending on the application.
The large granite mortar & pestle I bought at a department store in a totally random find. They only had two and I should have bought them both. The quality is excellent and it's a good size. We wet and dry grind in it.
The Vitamix and Sumeet will both wet grind spices, but you have to put enough in the Vitamix for it to work right - otherwise the tornado inside swirls everything towards the sky inside the tall container. The Sumeet was specifically designed to handle wet grinding of spices (at least the attachment I am talking about here). I need a Sumeet shape with a Vitamix blade, base and power.
Tonight we made Palak Paneer from Yamuna Devi's Lord Krishna's Cuisine. It calls for wet grinding the spices along with water or whey, and fresh ginger and chili. We omitted the chili for Arundhati's sake, and because it was such a small quantity Debashis ground it up in the mortar & pestle. It was pretty easy to make because we had everything we needed on hand - right from our arsenal. Debashis served that with coconut rice and it made us wonder why have we been missing out on coconut rice all these years?
A friend today said he put curry powder on his dinner and liked it, and my first thought was......what kind of curry powder? We generally grind all of our own. If you have a favorite blend, let me know!
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