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Actually, rather than just the month, maybe this is my favourite book of the year so far!

Curry: Fragrant Dishes from India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows I like chillis and hot food. Bec sometimes asks that we have something without chillis or spice in now and then, and my lip curls up (though we do have that plain type stuff now and then…) So this book was bound to appeal!

We’ve got some other curry books, but something about this book just really appeals. Somehow it’s a bit less fussy than some others. The ingredients are easily available here either in the supermarket, if not already in the spice drawer or fridge. It also really seems to get across the slight difference in regional ingredients, and therefore tastes, in the world of curry, and all the recipes we’ve tried have been fantastic so far. You might have seen the bread entry a couple of weeks ago.  Even the bread is fantastic fun!

One thing I’ve really noticed, going though the book, and with the recipes we’ve already tried, it’s amazing how many are soooo close to each other, but but adding or removing just one ingredient, or changing just slightly the balance of spices etc, you get a completely different taste and/or texture.

I’d love to be able to just know the ingredients and methods well enough to get the exact taste I want without a recipe.  I guess it’s just going to take a lot more practice.  Damn! Oh well, the sacrifices we have to make for our art… Or dinner! However, it’s going to be harder to bring ourselves to try too many of some style of curries now we’ve found out how bad for you coconut cream/milk is!… I really, really wish we’d not found that out!

I’m really looking forward to trying all the recipes we’ve not got to yet!

Recommend it to anyone so far.

I have to confess I’m feeling a little, erm, “tired” as I write this. Yesterday we went to a Decanter New World wine tasting with Rach and Rup. Apparently there were 300 wines there on 59 stalls. We didn’t quite try all of them, but we gave it a fairly decent try! My “tasting notes” indicate I sampled 52 wines from 24 stalls during the afternoon.

I say “tasting notes”, but really they really aren’t more than a few words to show that we’d actually tasted a wine, mainly so we didn’t keep going back to the same ones. In fact often I’d just put a random squiggle thing under the wine listing. And no, that’s not because that’s all I was capable of, honest! Some notes are actually slightly more informative.  “Yum” and “good” appear a few times, along with “blech” and “nah”.  No mention was made of any sweaty saddles.

We also seemed to manage to get the balance of spitting and swallowing right too.Why do I say that?  Biggest giveaway was that we were still standing at the end of it all! And even still able to take note of what we’d tried. But we’d had just enough to bring ourselves to ask a couple of the stall holders if we could take away their opened bottles…  Including quite an expensive one.  Certainly more than we’ve ever considered paying for a bottle, anyway.

I guess it also helped that we were sensible and  went and got a big greasy lunch from a pub nearby after a couple of hours!
A really fun day out, but I’m glad we had nothing planned for today.

I was cleaning off some photos from the memory card today and came across this one that we originally took to chuck up on the blog.

We made some leavened Roti  bread to go with our curry the other week, and while the recipe did say ” bake for 3-5 minutes until lightly browned and a bit puffy” we weren’t quite expecting quite this amount of puffiness!  In fact they were quite hard to poke down so we could get more than one sitting on a plate.

It was actually quite fun making them too.  We’ll just  have to remember to be quite organised if we want to make them again.  As it’s leavened bread, it does need a bit of time and attention… Yum though.

Sometimes things just come together right.

A day working at home, a few interesting things in the fridge, a recipe I’d found the night before, a bit of motivation… And voila! A chorizo, tomato and bean salad for lunch with a red onion and honey dressing.  Somewhat more interesting that the baguette or sandwich I’d probably have at work, but you’re probably thinking “OK, still not really that interesting.  If I wanted to know what people had for lunch I’d go follow the idiots on Twitter instead”….

And I agree.  The interesting thing about this lunch for me is that it almost looked exactly like the picture in the magazine!

I think I can probably count on one hand the times that’s happened in the last  year or two! And OK, it’s only a salad, but it still impressed me.

Now I just have to remember to clean up before Bec gets home…

Back to the office and a boring sandwich again tomorrow, I suspect!

We have a bought a few new cookbooks lately.  Strangely enough more of them seem to be curry ones, for some reason! So as we’ve got them, we thought we better try a new recipe.  Today it was something from ‘Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible’. First recipe we have tried from it. Gets a huge thumbs up.  Nice and subtle, not purely based on heat, but just gentle and all round yummy!

It’s was also really easy to cook, but as the flavours are pretty mild they almost get lost with a bit of cumin seed rice that we decided to have with it.  They only gripe I have is that I got all the cardomom pods and some of the cinnamon stick.  What does that tell you, that Mike rigged it that way? (Only problem is that I dished up, so must’ve been unlucky as he got none!)

Would we give it another go?  I think so!

This week the parsley plant has taken a bit of a beating.  We used a fair few of it’s leaves for 3 nights in a row, but luckily it looks like it’s coping with that.

I have to say that when we were chopping  it up there was a yummy parsley smell in the kitchen that we’ve just not had with the bought bags.. Now if the coriander would just get a bit of a wriggle on, we’ll be able to see if that does the same.

Apologies for the photo.  This was taken when we first used some, but it has needed some serious tweaking due to some sunlight issues at the time…

The credit crunch or whatever you want to call it seems to have had a bit of an impact on the available supply of Guinea Fowl, or something.  The supermarket by work has them on special at the moment, so I thought we’d give one a go to see what they’re like.

So waddaya do with them?!  Only thing I seem to recall seeing reasonably regularly is piri-piri spatchcock Guinea Fowl, so thought I’d give that a go.

With a bit of help from some instructions for the internet, the spatchcocking actually went pretty easily.  The kitchen shears/scissors that we’ve inherited that can’t seem to cut anything else seemed pretty much at home chomping though the bones.  I was impressed! And I’d like to think I managed to do a pretty good job of it too!

Now to see what it tastes like when it finally finishes cooking…

Something a bit different for tea the other night.  Filled wraps for dinner. Actually, filled wraps are quite usual here, but using home “baked” tortillas instead of the store bought ones (which we didn’t have) was new.

They were pretty easy to make, and tasted pretty yummy too. Not bad for just flour, water and salt, with a bit of time and muscle power.  I haven’t really got the knack of making them round yet though. But who needs perfectly round anyway!

Now I’ll always be wondering whether to use home made or purchased ones whenever we need any…

I’m still not quite sure what made her keen, but Bec decided to make bread the other night to go with tea. Which was pretty good thinking really, as it became pretty much the whole of our tea that night…

And as we’re pretty keen to find anything interesting to write about for the blog that actually doesn’t need much in the way of deep comment we made sure we kept a photo diary of the event.

Luckily for you, dear reader, we’ve skipped the boring bits, like bowls of dough sitting around for ages in the hot water cupboard getting nice and fat.  The first “exciting” bit was after there had been 3 lots of dough rolled out that had to be filled with a whole lot of cooked red onions. A lot of onions. And we didn’t even use as many as it appeared the recipe called for.  And I’ll digress here for a moment, if I may.  If a recipe calls for 750gms of onions, peeled and finely chopped, does the 750gms relate to the inital unpeeled weight, or the final chopped amount?  It’s confusing.  And not very helpful. Hmm.

Anyway, here’s the spreading happening…

And how it all looked when we’d finally worked out how to plait them together.  Bec seems to be able to plait her hair behind her without thinking about it, but plaiting in front of you (with massive bits of dough, I agree) seemed to be a bit more confusing…

A bit more sitting around rising time later, and it was into the oven.  Then out again, looking pretty good.

And after almost enough cooling time, into out tummies did it go.  Not too bad. A little doughy, I give it a 7/10. But as it was the first baking in this oven,  I think we can be reasonably happy with it.

Yup, we liked the chutney so much that we decided to make some more last weekend.  And it helped to use up some of the veges still in the fridge….

We’ve almost chomped through the first one now anyway, and by the time this one’s brewed up properly we’ll be ready for it!

Yum!