Curry goat

It's considered bad blog etiquette to start a post by apologising for being away for so long but given my performance over the last year or so I feel I have to.

The enforced peripatetic life of a tenant means that not all food bloggers have a dream kitchen and for the last year I've endured the foodie hell of living in a town with some really excellent food shops in a flat with a tiny kitchen.  I just haven't wanted to cook anything more than the simplest meals, which is why there have only been four posts in the last year, and I note that one of those has the word "fail" in the title and another "leftovers."

Another move has happened though, and this one through choice!  Shall we find out what good quality, value eating is like in one of the foodiest destinations in the south?  We're going to have to because after a long absence I've returned to Brighton.  There's everything here, from the dirtiest fried chicken or kebab to fine dining via some of the most exciting, innovative food going.  I'm really looking forward to this chapter.

Let's start with some home cooking though.

If this blog has a regular reader, he or she might remember a rant I did a couple of years ago about the quality of food at outdoor events.  My internet campaign didn't change anything, obviously.  I still go to folk music festivals where the food is amazing, and I still go to more traditionally male events like air shows where the food is barely fit for the dog.

Never mind.  In consolation, I polished off a most amazing Jamaican curry goat from a stall making its debut at the Cropredy Festival this year and when, a month and a house move later, I saw a stall selling goat at the monthly Lewes Farmers' Market I knew what I had to do.

I can't claim this as being a "value" dish because the goat mutton was expensive - £9 for 500g, making it about twice the price of braising steak - which suggests there's something wrong in the industry.  There's a huge amount of goat milk and cheese available in our shops... what's happening to the male kids?  I'd suggest the goat meat industry has to grow as an urgent welfare issue - presumably they're just being slaughtered otherwise. If it's happening anyway, much better that the meat goes to good use.

I did some intensive googling and came away with this recipe from Girl Interrupted which I pretty much followed to the letter, except for running out of ginger and using coconut milk instead of water to cover the meat before putting it in the oven.

It includes a step of dry-frying spices, which I quite like doing at six o'clock in the morning after a night shift because it means the first time I see my girlfriend is when she appears round the door saying "That smells amazing," which is not what she usually says to me first thing.

Oh, and I used home-grown Bartlett's Bonnet chilli peppers.

Definitely one to add to the repertoire.  It was easy and delicious, and if you can't get hold of goat it would be just as good with sheep mutton - and if you can't get that (and it is stupidly hard to get hold of) I reckon lamb neck would be a good economical substitute.

Balance is maintained.  One of the first things I did after moving was attend the Shoreham Air Show which was a brilliant event marred by beige food.  If it wasn't cheap fried meat you wanted, tough tits.  Shame.

Oh yeah, I didn't, did I?  Sorry for being away for so long.

Tandoori Butter Chicken

This is one of those recipes that I've done quite a few times down the years, but never really adapted - partly because I don't know enough about Indian cookery to experiment too much, and partly because it's perfect as it is.  It's a direct lift from Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, published to accompany her 1982 BBC TV series and so almost as old as I am.

The first step is to make tandoori chicken.  Madhur Jaffrey does give a recipe for this, but I've had perfectly good results from shop-bought tandoori masala so I tend to use that.  I don't recall ever seeing it in supermarkets, but it's widely available in specialist Indian food shops, and if your little local shop is run by an Indian family they probably sell it too.  This came from Taj in Brighton.

Just mix a healthy amount - say three tablespoons - and a smaller amount of garam masala up with a pot of plain natural yoghurt to make a marinade.

Chop up some chicken (I favour thighs, but breasts are fine) and mix it all up in the marinade.  Cover and leave in the fridge for a few hours (or overnight, if you want).

The essence of tandoori - that is, cooked in a tandoor - is the fabulously high temperature of that traditional Indian clay oven.  You can't achieve that at home, but you can go some way towards emulating it.

Your know your oven better than I do.  Some take longer to heat up than others.  You want it as hot as it can be though, so some time before you want to eat turn it on and turn it up as high as it will go.  Mine is pretty good and takes about half an hour to get to an indicated 250C.

While that's doing, make the butter sauce.  It has to be the easiest Indian sauce ever:  simply put the following ingredients in a measuring jug or bowl and stir until mixed together.  Four tablespoonfuls of tomato puree, 250ml water, some ginger (I'm experimenting with the new Sainsbury's line of frozen herbs in ice-cube-like arrangement - the ginger works well, the garlic is overpoweringly strong), a small tub of cream, a teaspoonful of garam masala, a pinch each of salt and sugar, a chopped chilli pepper (or whatever heat is convenient for you to add), a smattering of fresh or dried coriander leaves, a wee bit of ground cumin and either the juice of half a lemon or four teaspoonfuls of Jif lemon juice.  Once they're all in, add - wait for it - one hundred grammes of butter.  I did tick the "indulgent" tag.

Is your oven really hot now?  Excellent.  Take a cast-iron pan or a sturdy baking tray and put it over a high heat on the hob until it's giving off a shimmer.

Turn off the heat, put the chicken pieces on it, and chuck it in the oven.  It'll be cooked through with that nice slightly burnt edge that you get on restaurant tandoori chicken in the 12 minutes that it takes you to cook some rice.

Keep a really close eye on it.  By the time you smell burning, it's too late - there's about 30 seconds between "perfect" and "buggered."  Remember what Gordon Ramsay says - if it's brown it's cooked, if it's black it's fooked.

Once the chicken's in, pour the sauce into a deep frying pan and set it over a low heat.  Stir it every few minutes and it'll melange together.

When the chicken's cooked, add it to the sauce and give the whole lot a few minutes to get to know each other.

In an ideal world I'd serve this with a vegetable curry or a saag aloo but it's a weekday and I can't be bothered so here it is, served simply over pilau rice.

Chickpea Curry

Today has been the hottest day of the year so far - a forecast 32C, and I think the reality was a degree or so less than that here in the South East.  We had all sorts of plans, but nothing really got done.

I didn't really want to cook tonight at all but I'd planned for this, there's not much else in stock and it was this or toast really.

First up, make the spice paste.  Measure out two teaspoonfuls each of ground cumin and coriander (or whole, if that's what you've got in the cupboard) and one of chilli flakes, or cayenne pepper.  I don't have any fresh chilli peppers at the moment or I'd have used one of those instead.

Get them cooking in a dry frying pan over a low heat, then when the seeds start to pop (assuming you used whole seeds), add some olive oil, a chopped clove of garlic and some ginger - a small piece if you're using fresh, or a teaspoonful of the preserved stuff.

Keep the heat low - there's no hurry here, we just want to let everything sweat.  On a day like today, it barely needs the gas on.

While they're frying away, chop up two large tomatoes into small pieces then add them too.  Swoosh them around a bit, then add 150ml vegetable stock and bring it to the boil.

Let it simmer, then pour the mixture into a food processor and whizz it into a paste.  I added a bit much stock and mine was more soup than paste, but never mind.  Keep this paste to one side for the moment.

Now, chop an onion into smallish pieces and start that sweating in oil over a low heat.  Use the same frying pan, no need to clean it.  Cut about 150g mushrooms (six big cup mushrooms) into chunks and add them too.  They'll need about six minutes.

When they're getting nice and soft add a tin of chickpeas, some coriander leaves and the paste you made before.  Let it come to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes - which is exactly the right amount of time to cook basmati rice, so get that going (200g uncooked should do, to make four portions).

If the curry looks like getting too dry at any point, just add a splash of veg stock - you did have the foresight to make too much earlier, didn't you?

When it's all nearly done, stir in a small tin of coconut cream (Waitrose do a 160ml tin which is perfect) and, if you happen to have some in your cupboard, 75g ground almonds.

Serve over the rice.

This was lovely as it was, but meat eaters needn't despair - it would have been excellent with chicken instead of chickpeas. It's nice and mild so even on a hot day - and I'm typing this up at nearly midnight and still 25C - it slips down nicely.  Also, the whole thing (except the rice) can be cooked with the gas on as low as it will go, so it won't heat the house up too much.

Hugh's Cauliflower and Chickpea Curry

Although it's slipped a little bit of late (mostly because we're trying to empty the freezer), I'm still right behind the idea of having a veggie day at least one day a week.  We almost did it today, apart from the rasher of bacon that accidentally fell into the egg mayonnaise sandwiches we had for lunch.

My girlfriend bought me a copy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg Every Day as an Easter present and it is a beautiful item - we've both been poring over it and deciding what to have.

As ever, it's important to use what you've got rather than going out to spend money on more ingredients so we chose this one because there was a Romanesco cauliflower in the fridge from last week's veg box that needed using up quite urgently.  Everything else was in the store cupboard.

I don't want to abuse copyright by blogging a recipe from such a recent source so I won't go through all the steps, but Hugh credits his dish as being an adaptation of an Angela Hartnett recipe which can be found here.  The differences are vanishingly small, but to be honest I think Hartnett's version may offer better results - at the end I added "enough water to cover the cauliflower" which led to my curry being mostly water.  I knew even while I was doing it that it was too much, so Hartnett's 100ml might be more sensible.

While searching for an online version of the recipe, I came across this post on the excellent Veg Every Day? blog.  I've got to be honest...  I agree with every word of their assessment.  It was tasty, but it was no more than the sum of its parts in terms of flavour.  On the other hand, it was filling, low-calorie and very cheap.

Unlike the Veg Every Day? crew, I can't claim that my version was quick because I used sodding dried chickpeas.  Once this packet is finished, I'm never, ever buying them again.  Granted, they're cheaper than tinned chickpeas, but they need 24 hours soaking and 45 minutes of cooking, and they're no nicer than tinned ones.  Even for a spendthrift like me, this is an area where convenience trumps cost.  It's not like tinned chickpeas are a massively expensive indulgence.

Thai Green Prawn Curry

I absolutely love Thai green curry, but I'm always highly suspicious of curry sauce in jars.  They're expensive, and they always smell a bit funny when you open the jar.  This is a really fresh-tasting, zingy alternative, and it's not much more difficult than opening a jar.

First make the curry paste.  Just put the following ingredients into the blender and whizz until done:

A generous teaspoonful each of cumin, coriander and ginger, the juice of two limes, a good handful of spinach leaves, two Thai chilli peppers and two cloves of garlic.

Have a little taste of the resulting mixture, it's really zingy!

The curry cooks really quickly, so get your prep done before you start cooking.  It needs some sort of greenery - I used chopped pak choi, but mangetout or Chinese greens would be fine instead.

When you're ready to go, the curry cooks in 10 minutes, which is the same time as the rice.  So get the water boiling, tip the rice (I used a little bit over 100g of Thai Jasmine rice) in and get started.

Heat the wok and cook the greens for about a minute.  Then add the green curry paste and cook for three minutes.  Throw in a couple of sticks of dried lemongrass (or fresh, if you can find any).  Pour in a small tin of coconut cream and cook for three more minutes.  Finally, add the prawns (I used a 225g bag of raw ones) and cook for another three minutes.  Prawns cook so quickly, it doesn't make much difference if you choose to use cooked or raw ones.  They're such an easy item to cook, too - once they're pink and no longer transparent, they're done!  Just take care not to overcook them.

By this time the prawns are cooked, the rice will be ready so you can remove the lemongrass and serve!

These quantities made three portions, one each for us and one in the freezer to be nuked at work at some point.

Feel free to mess about with the ingredients.  Kale or any other green leaf vegetable would be a nice substitute for the spinach, or you could use chicken instead of prawns.  Thai curries often have avocado in them, or if you've got something like button mushrooms hanging about in the fridge they'd be a nice addition too.

The Skinny

Make the curry paste: put a generous teaspoonful each of cumin, coriander and ginger, the juice of two limes, a good handful of spinach leaves, two Thai chilli peppers and two cloves of garlic in a blender and whizz it all up.

Chop two pak choi

Start the rice cooking

Cook the pak choi in a hot wok for about a minute

Add the curry paste and cook for three minutes

Add a small tin of coconut cream and cook for three more minutes

Add prawns and cook for three more minutes

By this time the rice will be cooked, so serve up

Garnish with fresh coriander leaves, if you happen to have any

WeightWatchers ProPoints

11 per serving, including the rice

Chicken tandoori masala

I love curries - eating them and cooking them - but I doubt mine are very authentic.  If you're looking for real Indian food this probably isn't the best place to look but it will be tasty!  Tandoori masala is a bit of a British mashup anyway, so feel free to play with it.

For example, this would normally be quite mild but the Manicure Maniac's got a stinking cold at the moment and a really hot curry is always good for those.

I always seem to be marinading meat at the moment, and tonight's no exception.  I absolutely love British curry house tandoori chicken - that fantastic red colour and smoky flavour.  I buy tandoori masala marinade from the local corner shop, which has a fantastic range of Indian ingredients.  I've never seen it in a supermarket, but all the different places I've lived have had an Indian corner shop somewhere nearby.

So - chop up some chicken into bite-sized pieces (thigh or breast, whichever you prefer, but thigh's much cheaper and just as nice), mix the tandoori masala powder up with some plain natural yoghurt and leave it in the fridge overnight.

When you're ready to eat, cook the chicken under the grill.  A real tandoori is an incredibly hot oven and your grill doesn't have a chance of getting up to the required temperature so just preheat it and get it as hot as it will get before putting the chicken under.  If your grill is built in to the oven, try this: preheat the oven as high as it will go before you start grilling, to help raise the temperature all round.

When the chicken's cooked through with a few brown/black spots on the outside for that smoky flavour, set it aside and get started on the sauce.

Chop an onion and crush a clove of garlic.  Heat a saucepan and throw in a teaspoonful of cumin seeds.  Move them about, just to toast them a little.  Now add a knob of butter, a splash of vegetable oil, the onion and garlic, and a teaspoonful of smoked paprika.  Turn the heat down low and let everything mix together and soften - it'll take about 6-8 minutes.

At this point I added a chopped chilli pepper for heat - if you want a more "authentic" mild curry leave it out.

Now add a tin of tomatoes - or if you have some fresh ones that are perhaps a little past their best hanging about in the bottom of the fridge, chop them up and use them.  Stir well, scraping the bottom of the pan to get any flavoursome bits up, and simmer for about 10-15 minutes.  Then put the cooked chicken in and add a splash of cream for luxury - we had carbonara yesterday, so I had half a tub of cream left in the fridge.

While the sauce is cooking, make up a relish of yoghurt, grated cucumber, mint and turmeric.

Serve with rice and/or naan.

Taste verdict
I've had worse curries out!  No idea how authentic it is, but it tasted good and the chicken was really tender thanks to the night spent bathing in yoghurt.  Probably not the healthiest curry in the world, what with the knob of butter and splash of cream, but it didn't feel heavy and it didn't have that sheen of grease that you often get with takeaways.  It was quick and easy to make, too.

Financial verdict
2 skinless, boneless chicken thighs - £1.40
An onion - 20p
Tin of tomatoes - 40p
Butter, cream, yoghurt, spices, rice, cucumber - let's call it £1

£1.50 each

The skinny

Chop a few pieces of chicken into bite size pieces and marinade them overnight in yoghurt and tandoori masala spice mix

Grill the chicken as hot as your equipment will allow, until cooked through, and set aside

Cook a chopped onion and a crushed garlic clove in butter and vegetable oil over a low heat along with a teaspoonful each of cumin seeds and smoked paprika

When the onion is soft (about 6-8 minutes) add a tin of tomatoes and (optional) chopped chilli pepper.  Simmer for about 10-15 minutes

Add the cooked chicken and a splash of cream and warm through

Serve with rice and/or naan bread

WeightWatchers ProPoints

9 for the curry, plus 3 for the rice

Mutton saag

Another one from the Hairy Bikers, and another one where I don't repost a recent recipe.  I followed the instructions pretty much to the letter, but there wasn't enough mutton left on the Hunts Hill stall at the farmers market so it's padded out with some diced stewing lamb.

Hairy Bikers' stuff does tend to just work, and this one delivered.  In fact, it was quite fun to do with some glorious cooking smells.

Tasted pretty bloody marvellous too.  Believe it or not neither of us had had mutton before, but it was gorgeous - absolutely melt in the mouth.  The slow cooking allowed the flavours to all come through but mellowed the heat down.  Thanks Hairy Bikers!

Split pea and cauliflower paneer

Not all recipes go according to plan.  I thought long and hard before posting this, but decided to go ahead in the end.  I didn't want to look like an idiot for posting a recipe that I didn't think was any good, but then again we learn more from our failures than from our successes.  I'm new to vegetarian cooking and if this sort of thing helps me to learn then maybe it will help you too.

I've mentioned recently that my girlfriend and I are trying to have a veggie day at least once a week, inspired by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's current campaign.  While we make a great effort to only eat ethical meat, HFW makes the excellent point that ethical meat production simply can't sustain the rapidly growing population so the only solution is to eat more vegetables.

Indian cuisine is full of excellent veggie recipes, with a large proportion of Indians being vegetarian, so I'm starting my veggie journey with mostly Indian recipes.

When I go out for a curry I tend to order mutter paneer (peas 'n' cheese) as a side dish, so I thought I'd use paneer in this recipe.  Cauliflower works well with spices, and I haven't had cauli for ages.  Sugar snap peas suggested themselves for some reason, too.

If you're going without meat, pulses make an excellent alternative source of protein.  I haven't used them very often in the past but I've really enjoyed my recent chickpea recipes and they make an excellent store-cupboard staple so tonight I thought I'd experiment with yellow split peas.

Here goes then - cauliflower, sugar snap pea and split pea paneer.

When cooking curry it's a good idea to get your spice mix ready first, so prepare 2 teaspoonfuls coriander, 1 teaspoonful cumin, 1 teaspoonful turmeric, 1 teaspoonful mustard seeds and a cinnamon stick (or a teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, if that's what you have). 

Chop an onion, cut half a cauliflower into florets, and chop up a couple of chilli peppers.

Here's where I ran into trouble.  According to the packet instructions, my split peas would only need 15 minutes in boiling water, so after ten minutes I added the cauli to the same pan, and started sweating the onion, pepper and spices in oil in a frying pan.  It should have all come together at the same time, but the split peas just never seemed to get any softer.

When the cauli was done I fished it out, swirled it around with the onion and spices and turned the heat off under the frying pan, leaving the split peas to carry on boiling.

After half an hour they'd reached an edible texture, but they were still a bit hard - like slightly underdone pasta.

I asked my girlfriend for a second opinion.  She agreed that the texture didn't seem right but they were edible and we were starving by this point so we agreed to press on.

Re-light the heat under the frying pan, remove and discard the cinnamon stick, and add the sugar snap peas, about 100g paneer cut into cubes and the sugar snap peas.  Then pour a tin of coconut cream and some of the cooking water from the split peas into the pan.  Drain the split peas and throw them in too.  Heat it all through gently for about ten minutes.

Ideally you'd serve with naan bread, but we used pittas that we'd found lurking in the back of the freezer.

Taste verdict
Maybe I was harsh in the first paragraph.  Now that I've written it up and thought it through I'd call it a flawed recipe rather than a failed one.

The Manicure Maniac and I both ate most of it but left the split peas.  She didn't like the paneer cheese, finding it bland, but I love it - that's just personal preference.  We were both happy with the spice mix.

Maybe the instructions on the pack of split peas were utterly wrong, or maybe it's just that neither of us like split peas.  Maybe it would have worked really well if I'd used chickpeas or lentils instead.

Financial verdict
An onion - 20p
Half a cauliflower - 43p
100g paneer - 70p
100g sugar snap peas - 75p
Tin of coconut cream - 99p
Split peas, spices - pennies, from store.

£1.54 per portion.

Chickpea curry

Two posts in a row inspired by the blessed St Hugh!  His latest campaign points out the fact - and I'm afraid I do tend to agree with him that it is a fact - that we cannot carry on eating as much meat as we do without meat farming becoming ever more intensive.  I doubt that I would ever completely give up meat and fish, but I do intend to carry on eating meat as ethically as possible and try to have at least one vegetarian day per week.

The fact that this epiphany comes at the end of the month when I'm trying to make store-cupboard meals rather than go shopping is purely coincidence, of course!  Plus I'm working nights at the moment and I don't have the energy to do anything complicated.

Indian food has a huge variety of vegetarian dishes so I thought I'd start there, with a really simple chickpea curry.  Chickpeas are a handy ingredient to have in store, either dried or in tins.

I had dried ones, so I started out by putting 80g in fresh water to soak overnight. 

They then need 45 minutes to cook, so get them on the boil a while before you want to eat.

When the chickpeas are nearly done, get started on the rest of the curry.  Chop an onion and fry it in a wok until caramelised.

While that's cooking, prepare a spice mix of a pinch of salt and a teaspoonful each of cumin, coriander and turmeric, and chop up a couple of big tomatoes and a chilli pepper.

Add the spice mix to the onion and stir for a minute until it's all coated, then add the tomatoes and chilli pepper and stir.  Add a splash of water, then add the cooked chickpeas, a teaspoonful of preserved ginger and a pinch of garam masala and simmer over a low heat for a few minutes.

We had it with fresh bread, as my girlfriend had bought a nice loaf today, but pitta bread, naan bread or rice would do just as well.  If I had a coriander plant, I'd have served with a couple of coriander leaves on top but I haven't so I didn't.

It would have been nice with some spinach thrown in too, but um...  I forgot.

Taste verdict
I used fresh chilli peppers off the chilli plant which gave it a good kick, and it was the right decision to use fresh tomatoes rather than tinned - they gave it a lovely fresh flavour.  We didn't miss meat at all - it's a complete dish.

I used the instructions on the packet of chickpeas (40g per portion) but it made far too much - these quantities would have fed three or four.

Financial verdict
An onion - 20p
Two tomatoes - about 20p
Cumin, coriander, turmeric, ginger, garam masala, bread - pennies, from store

For information, a 500g packet of chickpeas costs 79p in Waitrose, and I've costed the chickpeas on the basis of the 40g per portion that I used.  In reality, you won't even need that much - this was really filling.

A truly value 23p per portion


The skinny
If using dried chickpeas, prepare them according to the packet instructions.  They will need soaking overnight

Cook the chickpeas

Chop an onion and fry in a wok until caramelised

Add spice mix of coriander, cumin and turmeric and stir

Add two chopped tomatoes and a chopped chilli pepper and stir

Add the cooked chickpeas, a teaspoonful of ginger (or some fresh ginger, if you prefer) and a pinch of garam masala

Stir for a couple more minutes then serve with rice or bread

WeightWatchers ProPoints
4 for the curry, plus whatever carb you choose to serve with it

Creamy Korma-esqe chicken curry

Sometimes lovely meals appear on a whim.  I was just going to have bog-standard chicken and pasta tonight, but then my chilli pepper plant caught my eye and I decided I wanted curry.  The chicken was already out of the freezer, but creamy luxurious curry from stuff that I've got in store?  No problem.

First of all, peel and chop an onion and a couple of garlic cloves, and slice up a couple of mushrooms and some chilli peppers.  You can add heat using dried chilli flakes or cayenne pepper if you prefer.

Get them all going in vegetable oil over a low heat for about six minutes - just to get some colour on.  Not too hot or they'll burn - on my cooker, I left it on minimum heat over one of the larger gas rings.

While that's going on, you can cut your chicken breasts up into bite-sized pieces.

This is probably a good time to get a pan of water on the boil for your rice.  Basmati rice goes well with curry, and it normally cooks in about 10-12 minutes depending on the brand.

While that's slowly cooking away, get your spice mix ready.  This is a vaguely korma-esque spice mix consisting of one heaped teaspoonful each of ground cumin,  ground coriander, garam masala and turmeric, with the seeds from inside four cardamom pods, bashed up a bit in a pestle and mortar (or whatever you have to hand - rolling pins are good.  Or the base of a pan).  Chuck in a good pinch of salt, too.

Add the spices to the pan and stir everything around so that the onion and mushroom get completely coated.  I just love this moment when the spices hit the pan - it smells fantastic.

Next, add two tablespoonfuls of tomato puree, stir it around, and add the chicken.  Turn the heat up a bit and stir until the chicken's taken on some colour.

Assuming your rice wants the 10-12 minute range to cook, now's the time to put it in the pan of boiling water.

With that done, add a really generous sprinkling of ground almonds to the chicken and (on a whim - they were next to the almonds in the cupboard) a good sprinkling of poppy seeds.

Mix everything up , then add about 500ml hot water from the kettle - enough to nearly cover the chicken.  Get the water to a simmer - bubbles regularly breaking the surface, but not a roiling boil - and let it all cook for a while.

When the rice is nearly cooked, add 100ml cream to the chicken.  This isn't strictly necessary (and certainly not WeightWatchers approved) but it's damn tasty and anyway I had cream leftover from the carbonara the other night - it only would have gone in the bin otherwise.

Serve on rice and enjoy. 

Taste verdict
Granted, there may have been an element of flattery involved but my girlfriend really enthused about this one!  I was pleased as well.  I've had worse from Indian takeaways.  The sauce fulfilled the brief of creamy and luxurious, and because most of the cooking's done on a low heat the chicken kept a nice moist texture.

Financial verdict
Two large chicken breasts - these came from the butcher and I can't remember how much they cost.  Generally speaking, the butcher carries good quality meat and charges slightly less than the supermarkets for equivalent quality.  Waitrose and Sainsbury's both charge around £15/kilo for free range breasts, so let's say about £6.  Of course, the butcher sells whole chickens at two for a tenner so if you don't mind the effort of preparing it yourself you can bring this down a fair old bit.
100ml cream - 55p
Some mushrooms - 20p
An onion - 20p
200g rice - 30p
Garlic, chilli, cumin, coriander, turmeric, salt, cardamom, tomato puree, ground almonds, poppy seeds - pennies, from store.

These quantities made two really generous main meals, plus three more slightly smaller ones which are now rapidly cooling in the freezer making £1.45 per portion.


The skinny
Peel and chop an onion and two cloves of garlic

Slice a couple of mushrooms and chilli peppers

Start the onion, mushroom and chilli cooking in a frying pan in veg oil over a low heat

Start a separate pan of water on the boil for the rice

Prepare the spice mix: put a heaped teaspoonful each of ground cumin, coriander, garam masala and turmeric in a ramekin and add the seeds from four cardamom pods, bashed up in a pestle and mortar, and a good pinch of salt

Start cooking 200g basmati rice in the boiling water

Add the spice mix to the frying pan and mix until the onion is all coated

Add two tablespoonfuls tomato puree to the frying pan and mix it around

Add the chicken, diced into bite-sized pieces, and cook until browned on all sides

Add a generous sprinkling of chopped almonds and a rather smaller one of poppy seeds

Add about 500ml hot water and simmer for a while

When the rice is nearly cooked, add 100ml cream to the chicken and stir

Carrying on simmering until the rice is done, then serve

Lamb and Sweet Potato Curry

An unexpected day off coincided with a random craving for lamb curry today.  Excellent - an excuse to do something with a cheap cut of lamb!  I used neck of lamb, but supermarkets also sell diced "stewing lamb" - or you could use mutton, if you can find it.

I have made lamb curry before, but I felt like doing something different today so I went a-googling.  I quickly settled on a recipe from Cuisine.com.au that sounded nice, but there were a couple of fairly glaring things wrong with the recipe - seriously, it would never have worked - so I've tweaked it into something that will.

The first thing to do is get your marinade going.  Mix half a tablespoonful of turmeric into a few tablespoonfuls of plain, natural yoghurt.  Dice the lamb into bite-sized pieces and mix it all up.  You're going to have to get your hands into that bowl, and yes your fingernails are going to go yellow.

Cover and leave in the fridge to marinade - ideally overnight, but an hour will suffice.

When you're ready to start cooking, the first thing to do is the spice mix.  I often get really annoyed with curry recipes at this point, because they list all the ingredients together at the top in an apparently random order then at a certain point say, "add all the spices" and you find yourself running back and forth between the cooker and the cupboard where the spices live trying to remember which ones you've already added.  My advice is to get the spice mix ready before you've got a hot pan to worry about.

So, take two tablespoonfuls of ground coriander, one of cumin and put them in a ramekin (or whatever).  Embarrassingly, I'm out of ground cumin so I bashed up some cumin seeds in the pestle-and-mortar.  Add one tablespoonful of poppy seeds and three of ground almonds.  The original recipe calls for ground cardamom, but I've never seen such a thing so I opened up five cardamom pods and bashed the seeds in the pestle-and-mortar.  Finally, some heat - today I used dried chilli flakes and a dash of cayenne pepper but feel free to use fresh chilli peppers or chilli powder if you want.

All that's left to do now is chop an onion and crush three cloves of garlic in the pestle-and-mortar and we're away.

This is a one-pot meal, so choose a nice big pan.  Heat some oil and gently fry the chopped onion until soft.  Add the crushed garlic and two tablespoonfuls of preserved ginger (or the equivalent amount of fresh, if you want).  Add the marinaded meat and fry until browned on all sides.

This is where the original recipe went a bit wrong.  It said to leave the pan on the lowest possible heat for 90 minutes...  which would probably result in your kitchen catching fire, and definitely result in an inedible, burnt mess of food.  No, we definitely need to add liquid here, in the form of about 750ml of stock (lamb stock if you've got it, vegetable if, like me, you haven't).

If you own a slow-cooker, you could put everything in there at this point and leave it happily bubbling away on "low" until you're ready to eat.

Chuck in a couple of cinnamon sticks, a couple of star anise, about four cloves and a couple of bay leaves.  You can probably leave them out without much ill-effect if you want to.

Bring to the boil, then put the lid on, turn the heat down to its lowest setting and go off and do something else for an hour.  I can never resist checking back a few times to smell and taste, and I found that it was boiling a bit more than I wanted, so I moved the pan to one of the smaller gas rings.

After an hour, peel and chop two sweet potatoes into bite-sized pieces and add them to the pan.

Add a tin of coconut milk (or coconut cream, I'm not really sure what the difference is.  Definitely nothing to do with cows though) and leave the lid off so that it the liquid will reduce.  When there's just enough liquid left to pour over as sauce, it's ready.

One problem with marinading in yoghurt is that you can never buy a small pot of natural yoghurt, but only enormous ones.  So we need to find something to do with the rest of it, and a natural accompaniment to a hot spicy curry is raitha.

Dead simple this - just chop up a chunk of cucumber and mix it in with yoghurt, a little pinch of turmeric and quite a large pinch of mint.  It's just my stab at the stuff that comes with poppadoms in Indian restaurants, which I think goes very nicely with a hot curry to take the heat away.

The curry's nearly ready now, and I felt it was a bit light on veg so chucked in a couple of lumps of spinach from the freezer.  Again, not strictly necessary, but vegetables are good for you.  Isn't frozen spinach the weirdest stuff though?

Pick the cinnamon sticks, star anise and bay leaves out, as well as the cloves if you can find them, and serve.  This doesn't really need rice or naan bread, but go the whole hog if you want to.  I do love a bit of mango chutney though.

We divided this into four portions in order to get it down to the required WeightWatchers points, with the other two going into Tupperwares in the freezer for another day.  Hungry people could divide by three, but it really was plenty for us.  You can always bulk it out with rice or naan if you want, or if you've got more people to feed.

I had a very pleasant afternoon slow-cooking, back in my kitchen after a weekend's camping, so I did laugh when I looked once more at the original recipe and noticed that it's labelled as Indian, Quick and Lunch.  Is one out of three a good score?

I can't promise that you'll like all the recipes from this blog, but I can promise that they'll work at least - this is all stuff that we've eaten at home.

Taste verdict
Just the cooking smells coming off this were enough to have my girlfriend making orgasmic noises, and it tasted just as good.  I've had worse from Indian takeaways.  Pleased with this one!

Financial verdict
250g lamb neck fillet - £3.30
An onion - 20p
2 sweet potatoes - 60p
Tub of plain yoghurt - 90p
Half a cucumber - 40p
Tin of coconut milk - 80p
3 cloves garlic, 1 tablespoonful turmeric powder, 2 tablespoonfuls preserved ginger, 2 tablespoonfuls ground coriander, seeds from 5 cardamom pods, 1 tablespoonful ground cumin (or cumin seeds bashed up in pestle-and-mortar), chilli to suit your taste, 1 tablespoonful poppy seeds, three tablespoonfuls ground almonds, two cinnamon sticks, two star anise, two bay leaves, four cloves, stock cube, 2 lumps of frozen spinach - from store.  Probably more than pennies this time, though.

Difficult one, this, because so much has come out of store that it's probably more than just a few pence worth, and because there's some stuff in there that I wouldn't expect everyone to have (I had to go out to get the poppy seeds and ground almonds).  However, I have included the price of a full yoghurt pot and a full cucumber portion, and you're not going to use them up so I think it probably comes out about fairish.  Assuming four portions, this adds up to £1.55 per portion.  If you're buying all the spices for the first time it'll come to considerably more, but they will last a long time and you will use them in plenty of other dinners. 

The skinny
Dice lamb into bite-sized pieces.  Marinade in yoghurt and turmeric.  Cover and leave in the fridge overnight if possible, or for at least an hour.

Prepare the mix of spices, poppy seeds and ground almonds.

Chop an onion and crush three garlic cloves.

Using a large pan, fry the onion gently until soft.  Add the garlic and some preserved ginger.  Add the meat and fry until browned all over.  Add the spice mix.

Stir until everything is covered in spices.

Add 750ml of stock and some cinnamon sticks, star anise, cloves and bay leaves.  Bring to the boil, then back off to the lowest possible heat, put the lid on and leave to simmer for an hour.

After an hour, chop the sweet potatoes into bite-sized pieces and add to the pan, along with a tin of coconut cream.  Leave the lid off.  The potatoes will be ready at about the same time that the liquid has reduced into a nice thick curry sauce.

Add some frozen spinach towards the end of cooking time, if you want to.

Prepare cucumber raitha by chopping up a chunk of cucumber and mixing with yoghurt, a small pinch of turmeric and a large pinch of mint.

When the sweet potatoes are cooked and the cooking liquid has reduced to a nice thick sauce, serve with raitha and mango chutney.

WeightWatchers ProPoints
8 (based on dividing into four portions)