Beef Vindaloo with Chapatis and Raita

So I decided to try my hand at some Indian style cooking - ended up with some mixed results. I got to grind my own curry powder out of some whole spices, which was cool - I learned that curry powder doesn't have to be super hot and spicy, it's just any blend of spices you choose to use, so I only made mine mildly spicy because my mom can't handle really spicy food. Anyway, the beef vindaloo is where the spice mix went, and it tasted good, but the meat was tough, and I'm sure that was my fault, but I followed the recipe to the letter, so I don't know why it turned out that way. Something more to work on.
The rest of my adventure included chapatis, which are a flat bread that you cook on a griddle - they're supposed to puff up and be flakey on the inside, which mine didn't do, so I know that one is my fault, I've never been very good at making bread - so I'll have to work on that too. :)
The last thing I made was cucumber raita - it's a yogurt sauce with cucumber, garlic, mint, and golden raisins. The trick to the meal is, you're supposed to take a piece of a chapati, use it to pick up a piece of the beef vindaloo (look ma, no forks!), then you dip it in the raita and eat it, which worked out pretty well, I thought it was really good. The raita was, by far, the best thing I made, it was so good! It was tangy because of the yogurt, sharp from the mint and garlic, with little bursts of sweetness when you bit into one of the raisins, plus, the cucumber flavor was awesome (but I love the taste of cucumber anyway).
So, even though the beef vindaloo and the chapatis didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, when all of it was put together, it was still pretty good. I'd like to try it again just so I can work on getting the beef and the chapatis right. For now though, I'll move on to my next adventure in cooking, hopefully it will turn out a little better than this one - stay tuned!