Day 2 went pretty much to plan except I switched the fish curry for a Ladakhi chicken curry, and the saag aloo for a chana dhal with spinach. The rice stayed on the menu as per the original plan. It’ll be fish curry and saag aloo for tonight.
The curry recipe came from Christine Mansfield’s “Taste of India”, a gorgeous mix of travelogue and cookbook and a must for anyone who wants to play with different types of Indian food. She covers regions from Bengal and the Punjab in the north to Andhra Pradesh in the south. The combination of commentary, photos and recipes has reinforced my desire to spend a couple of months travelling through India improving my Indian cooking skills. Christine is well known particularly in her native Australia; anyone who watches Masterchef Australia will have seen her. The book’s major shortcoming is that it’s covered in silk which is gorgeous but highly impractical in the kitchen. I did manage to find it a home where the cover is safe, although the pages themselves are less so. I have flagged so many recipes in there that I’ll be in experiment heaven for months.
The meal came out well although when she says use ripe tomatoes for the sauce, she means RIPE. I’ll have to try this one again after the challenge is done to see if I can get the sauce a little more saucy. The recipe has very few ingredients for an Indian dish but packs a nice flavour punch. I used Kashmiri chilli powder, which has a good kick but also has a very pleasant taste rather than just heat.
The chana dhal recipe is definitely a keeper – I added a few tweaks and cooked it for longer than the recipe said so it was nice and creamy. I tried an experiment with the rice and it came out better than any I’ve made before. I warmed a little butter in the pan and covered the rice in it before adding the water. One stir after the water was boiling, cover on, turn down to simmer, one stir right before the end and voila, great rice.
So now it’s 7:30am on Sunday and I’m getting ready to prep today’s offering. We’re heading into London to have lunch with friends at a Chinese restaurant called China Tang so it’s a shorter cooking day than yesterday.
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