Mulligatawny Soup

I've heard of mulligatawny soup before, but it was one of those words I'd heard while never really knowing what it was (like vissisous). Apparently it's an Indian dish that made it's way over here a long, long time ago. I looked it up on Pinterest and all the recipes used lentils, but Fannie's uses meat, listed as an optional ingredient. With or without meat, she doesn't mention lentils. Since I was trying to make a FF recipe, I followed hers rather closely, with the exception of using a red pepper in place of celery, since I don't have celery and it would be criminal to buy a vegetable at this point, with my counters overflowing with homegrown organic veggies of all sorts (except the celery variety).

Here's my adaptation for this:

Ingredients:

4 tbsp butter
1 diced onion
1 diced carrot
1 diced green pepper
1 diced red pepper (or a couple stalks of celery, which I didn't have, so I used peppers)
1 diced apple
1 jalepeno, minced (or 1/8 tsp. cayenne)

1 lb raw beef
1/3 c. flour
1 tbsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
6 c. water (or use beef broth if you have it)
2 crushed cloves
1 large tomato, chopped
salt & pepper to taste

3 c. cooked brown rice

optional garnishes: slivered almonds, cashews, or chilled banana slices. I didn't use any of these. I used some plain yogurt for garnish, because it's what I usually eat with Indian food.

Directions:
Melt 2 tbsp. butter in large pot

  Add vegetables and meat (everything down to the flour) and cook 15 minutes on low heat, stirring often.

 Add other 2 tbsp. butter, flour, nutmeg & curry powder and cook 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add water, cloves, tomato, salt & pepper and simmer 30 minutes.

Serve in bowls atop rice, with preferred garnish.

I'm not a huge fan of Indian curry, so I wasn't crazy about this, but it was okay. My husband liked it well enough, and my son ate it one day as well. Since it makes a big pot of soup, we ended up having it for dinner a couple times, though my son requested a cheese sandwich the second night we had this. It's a good soup if you like curry. Otherwise, I'd skip this one.