Aloo ... what — in MY methi?!

Aloo Gobi is an excellent, and quite simple dish to prepare.

Seeing that I've been on such a monstrously bad streak lately, I decided to go all "mise en place" on this one, to ensure I didn't screw anything up. I prepped everything that could be prepped. And I cleaned everything that could be cleaned. This way, all the ingredients; all the components of the dish were sorted. And — most important of all — it'd make everything much easier.

So, here's the mees:

One teaspoon of cumin seeds:

One whole onion, half a dozen cloves of garlic, and 2" of ginger, finely chopped (I had half a leftover onion, and added that to the mix):

1/4 cup dried fenugreek leaves, 1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves, 1 tablespoon ground coriander seeds, 1 teaspoon ground cumin seeds, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon turmeric:
 

This is simple, although I made a mistake here: the taters need to go in about 5 minutes before the cauliflower — the spuds need a head start.

Then, there's the tomatoes; two medium ones, or three small ones, chopped:

And about a cup of water or so. (Mind you, I actually added a bit more water later on, along with some corn starch, to thicken things up a tad):

And then, the final touch: just some cilantro leaves to decorate the plate:

Okay, here we go — let's cook this thing!

First off, you need to heat the wok up to "medium high" and throw some cumin seeds in. The recipe I have, claims you need to cook them for 30 seconds, but unless you're using some sorta Hasbro Easy-Bake toy oven, cumin seeds won't last (ie., won't taste good) for 30 seconds in a medium-high pan, so I just went about 10 seconds (or as long as it took for me to dump the onion-garlic-ginger load into it — hence, no picture of crackling cumin seeds bouncing around). This onion mixture should cook for about ten minutes, take a few, depending on your stove:

Next, the taters. They need a bit more time to cook than the cauliflower, so they have to be included in the mixture a bit earlier:

Then, "everything else, except the tomatoes and water": the spice and herb mixture (as described above):

And immediately after, that, add the cauliflower and mix it all together, adding the water and tomatoes. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes or so — or until the potatoes are cooked through:

Finally, serve it, decorated by chopped cilantro leaves. Heaven:

Except, not so much. This wasn't good at all. This was actually completely terrible! 

There was some gritty, nasty, teeth-grinding sand-like sorta stuff in this dish. And this wasn't the first time I've encountered it, either! I didn't know who the culprit was, but I thought it was the cauliflower. I had not washed it. Most of the veggies you get from a supermarket these day are very clean. There are a few items that you absolutely must rinse out — like leeks — but generally, things are reasonably clean. This wasn't. This was nasty.

However, after much scrutiny, it turned out that the cauliflower wasn't the problem at all. It was the damn fenugreek leaves — the methi! Please take a look at this picture. I added the match, for size. Those little pellets are basically sand; dust; dirt. And those are just the ones that didn't dissolve into sand — you can see some of the sand in the picture, though:

The culprit: