Balti dishes are used to making Balti, a kind of indian inspired (if not, orginated) fast food. Balti restaurants in the UK originated in Birmingham and spread rapidly. The basic idea is that a base mix (cooking mix) is made up of roasted and combined spices, then at the final stages a masala (sprinkling mix) is added but not cooked into the ingredients. The best kind of dishes are like small woks, especially well-worn ones, rather than the shiny things (probably kept at the back of the cupboard with the fondue set) advertised on the wedding site as more of a fashion item than a cooking item.

Here is an extract from http://www.owlsprings.com/the_balti_page.html which (for wordies, rather than foodies) gives a flavour of the controversy attached to the origins of the name.

What's a Balti?
It has nothing to do with Baltimore or Baltinglass, but a great deal to do with Birmingham....
The Balti is an Indian dish representative of a style of cooking which some say is native to Baltistan. It's a kind of curry, its ingredients usually assembled and cooked quickly in a manner reminiscent of a stir-fry.
The heart of this style of cooking is a cast-iron pot, originally also called the balti. The balti evolved into a half-hemispherical pot as likely to be made of steel as iron, and usually called the karahi or karai. A Balti is usually both cooked in the karahi, and served at the table in it. Typically served with Balti is naan bread, a thinnish leavened bread (somewhat like pita bread) torn up and used as an eating implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the sauce. This utensil-less approach turns Balti into one of the "sport" foods, like ribs: you get it, or it gets you, and sometimes both.
Balti in Europe started attracting notice during the last decade in Birmingham in England -- particularly in the city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti houses, and now increasingly known as "the Balti Belt." Word of the wonderfulness of Balti began to spread through the rest of the UK and elsewhere, with the result that Balti is rapidly turning into one of the "hot" things in the food world (to the amusement of those of us who've liked it for years).
...Just a note here about the origins of the name "Balti": various correspondents have written to say that Balti doesn't have anything to do with Baltistan, which they both describe as an area where most people are vegetarian, and not likely to have evolved a cuisine with so much meat in it. Saad As-Jandal adds, "It seems like the Pakistani community in Birmingham and elsewhere have attatched a romantic notion that these so called Balti dishes originate from Baltistan, whereas from my knowledge it is more commonly found in Peshawar North West Pakistan, where it is known as 'Karhai'. -- So please spread the word and let it be known."

Does Balti mean 'bucket'?
Well, yes, it does. At least it seems to in Hindi: how many other Subcontinental languages share the etymology, we're not sure.
Some controversy over the word has bubbled up in the last few years. There are those (among them some fairly influential restaurant owners) who claim that in their vocabulary, "balti" is "a dirty word". Rumours abound that the dish, or cooking style, was invented as a way to put drunken British "lager louts" in their place by "feeding them out of a bucket".
We decline to get involved in speculation about this, fascinating as etymology can be. The truth about Balti, in the UK at least, is that that is the name which most fans of the cuisine most readily recognize it, at the moment. Other restaurants may choose to move away from it: that's their choice. Meanwhile, where you don't see the term "balti", try looking for the words "karai" or "karahi", other names for the basic utensil. To a certain degree, the utensil determines the cooking style, as a corollary of the "form follows function" rule. And the whole point, after all, is to enjoy the food...
Incidentally, over the last couple of years -- in the face of the continuing popularity of the cooking style, perhaps? -- some of the personalities who had most vehemently insisted that Balti either "didn't exist" or was "not really Indian food at all" have done some surprising about-faces. The name of one prominent author of numerous Indian cookbooks, who not only refused to acknowledge Balti, but didn't even believe in curry, now appears on the labels of a major Indian food manufacturer's jars of Balti "mix". Life is strange...