My husband and I are both exhausted this evening...but happily so! We both accomplished a lot of work today. He only has a couple of more days before his canoe repair will be completed, hopefully, because he has put in such long days on the project and I ironed every miserable item of clothing in the pile in one go instead of separating it into two sessions today and one tomorrow. I am grateful for the two good sleeps in a row we both had and the subsequent burst of energy we both experienced.
So, we decided we didn't feel up to cooking a decent meal tonight. My husband toyed with the idea of using a food delivery service to order a restaurant meal, but after a bit of a rest, decided to go ahead and get a take out order from close to home at Caraway Grill. It has been about four years since we last ate there and with DarBar now closed on Mondays, it was our best bet for ethnic food.
We ordered:
- saffron basmati rice: delicious and a monstrous amount for the money. We will be eating it for the next couple of days. ($3.50)
-chicken curry: meh...tasty enough chunks of white meat in a red curry sauce. It was rather plebian, nothing to write home about, but adequate. ($14.99)
-mixed vegetables: absolutely superior! Fantastic mix of veggies with minced paneer. The flavour was out of this world and there were so many different vegetables! ($12.99)
-vegetable pakoras: fried to almost toothbreaking crunchiness. Again, a huge order but since it was mostly potato strips and onions it wasn't that fabulous. The accompanying cilantro chutney was fine, but the tamarind sauce was only so so. (($4,99)
-plain naan: a bit tough and chewy, although it looked fluffy. It was okay for $2.50. Naan is just a touch different at every Indian restaurant.
So, we will definitely try some of the other things on the menu in the future.
I am not certain how to compare it to DarBar as the cooking styles are different, but DarBar has many more choices on its menu, plus it has beef dishes. The prices at DarBar tend to be a dollar or two less on the entrees, but there isn't quite as much food per order as there is at Caraway Grill, so the cost evens itself out. It won't take us as long to try all the Caraway Grill menu items, but after two years of eating regularly at DarBar we still haven't tried more than half of the available dishes.
I have to say that Caraway Grill has the better take out containers! They are sturdy plastic with tightly fitting lids! Darbar is still using the equivalent of aluminum pie plates with cardboard press in lids that tend to spill the contents easily. If I could combine Caraway Grill take out containers with DarBar food...well, that would be the perfect takeaway meal!
My only real complaint with Caraway Grill is that there seem to be potatoes in too many dishes. Potatoes are a highlight apparently. The pakoras were more like the Indian version of fries than pakoras, both in shape and content. If there were other vegetables in those pakoras they weren't evident. There were potato chunks in the mixed vegetables as well. They were listed on the menu as ingredients in many of the vegetarian dishes. As much as I LOVED the Mixed Vegetable dish, it was so stuffed with carbohydrates that I could hardly have any rice or pakoras and the naan I only had the barest taste of. Even my husband wasn't jazzed about all those potatoes and he loves potatoes!
Anyway, it was a successful and reasonably priced meal with lots of leftovers. We will each get another full meal, plus a smaller lunch out of theose leftovers. YUM!!!
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