Post 91: Double curry fun.

In a shocker for anyone that's read this more than once, I've actually attempted to do some proper cooking! With a recipe and everyfink. Not that I followed it all of course.

Starting with Camelli Panjabi's 50 great curries of india:

The curry on the front is the malabar prawn curry, which I attempted to follow the recipe properly for. The second curry I attempted was the cauliflower gashi mangalore; which I used as inspirational rather than strictly following the recipe.

In an attempt to be organised, I chopped nad dragged out of the cupboard all the ingredients from both recipes:

Look at them all, there's tonnes of stuff: onions (chopped and sliced), garlic, ginger, cummin, mustard seeds, dry chillies, curry leaves, fresh chillies, cumin powder, fenugreek, tamarind paste, tomatoes, coriander powder, cinamon stick, paprika, tumeric, cauliflower, potatoes and coconut milk. And we were still several types of chillies and seeds missing.

Both curries seemed to required a bit more faffing than I could really see a need for. The amounts of some spices were 1/8th of a teaspoon: I'm not sure I'm refined enough to taste such itty bits. The cauliflower one required we made a spice paste; and I'm not sure we got this bit quite right; it looked much more like a sauce than a paste.

Here's the end results:


Both curries were very much runnier than the book's illustrations. To the cauliflower one, I added extra chicken and spinach, to spin it out a bit extra. On tasting the prawn curry is was super hot, but really really bitter; I suspect the tamarind paste I'd bought was more concentrated than the one in the recipe - a little sugar, and a bit extra coconut milk and it was back to tasting nice. Still super lively though.

For the cauliflower curry: it was nice enough, but I really couldn't tell the difference between my just making it up recipe and this doing this properly affair. I may repeat the malabar prawn, but shan't bother following the faff for the colly one.