Category: curry

chicken curry

Can the world take another generic ‘curry’ recipe? At least one more it seems.

We kick off with ginger, onions, lentils, turmeric and cumin with 2 pints of water. This is left for 40 mins, then diced chicken is added for a further 25 mins. As seasoning right at the end, cumin seeds, ginger, garlic, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt is fried until aromatic, then pounded to nothing and added to the curry with some lemon juice. Turned out pretty good.

The little beige puddle in the corner is one of my fave accompaniments: cashew butter. It’s just toasted cashews and cumin seeds blitzed with oil and salt. Yum!

beef curry food mince peas

balti beef

A dreadfully-named dish this one; but it inverts a standard cooking cornerstone in a way that really baffled me. It came from a Weight Watchers book of all places, though it has dubious dietary heritage.

Rather than the time-honoured tradition of: sweat onions in oil, then add meat, the method for this is to dry-fry mince until it starts to leak oil and then chuck the onions in. I suppose this is marginally healthier. I add grated garlic to this, then some patented Gary Masala and turmeric, with seasoning. Allowing these flavours to develop for a few minutes I then add a good puddle of beef stock, frozen peas and a tablespoon of mango chutney. It sounds utterly perverse, but after just a couple of minutes simmering you get a spicy, fruity, meaty bowl of food that is immensely satisfying.

cauliflower courgettes curry food

vegetable curry

Another one from Nigella: a filling, warming bowl of food that assuages post-Christmas guilt.

Relatively simple, tin tomatoes, whatever veg was to hand (courgette, cauliflower, onions, carrots, peas), stock and some Gary Masala, boiled up for a while and dotted with coriander.

Served with a chewy, fluffy naan, it’s seriously comforting.