The vegetarian curry went down very well. We ate the leftovers cold for lunch, with some of the ratatouille, which made a surprisingly good combination. And anyway, as I told the Systems Administrator, the last time I went to a trendy eatery in Kings Cross next door to the Central School of Art, main courses consisting of improbable mixtures of dishes were definitely In, along with faux hand typed menus stuck to hardboard clipboards with frayed corners. Which almost certainly means that they are now so 2014, and definitely Out, but never mind. Leftover curry and ratatouille was what we had.
I did the curry from a little Hamlyn paperback I've had since my student days. I know that, because it has my initials and pre-marriage surname written inside the front cover. It's simply called Indian Cooking by Attia Hosain and Sita Pasricha, and is an extremely useful book which deserves to be a classic, though it has probably sunk without trace. It was first published in 1963, revised in 1981, and has no photos at all. Its merits are twofold, firstly that everything I have ever made from it has tasted good, and secondly that the recipes are entirely based on things that you could buy in the English provinces more than three decades ago, which means that you can knock up supper out of things you already have in the cupboards, rather than scouring the exotic ingredients aisles of your local supermarket, if not ending up making a special trip to an Indian grocer. Which is fine if you live in north London but not so convenient in north east Essex. And you don't end up with several part used jars and packets that sit around the kitchen for ages until they end up being thrown away. Instead, last night's prosaically named Vegetable Curry number 2 used up some small potatoes and slightly ancient carrots that had been hanging around the fridge for ages.
I use their basic method for dal as well, which is to boil the lentils with some turmeric until they're soft, and season them with fried onion spiced with a lot of chilli and ginger. You want the onion to be searing on its own, so that by the time it's mixed in with the lentils the mixture will taste of something besides lentil. Which is not honestly the most interesting vegetable on its own, but great at soaking up other flavours. I used green lentils, because that's what I had in the cupboard, and they double up for a Spanish sausage recipe I cut out of a magazine some time in the 1980s.
Tonight I'm trying a tart and a bake neither of which I've done before. The tart is a cherry and polenta recipe out of Dan Lepard's baking book. The cake mixture, which contains ground almonds and cornmeal as well as flour, is spread out in a wide tin, you scoop out channels in it, and fill them with cherry compote. The compote is made with tinned cherries and cherry jam, and was a pain to do. The book said to cook the cherries with a small amount of water for about five minutes until most of the liquid had gone, but my cherries kept releasing moisture more or less indefinitely, and it got worse once I'd added the jam. In the end I got fed up and thickened them with a tiny amount of cornflour. The Best Before date on the packet was an embarrassingly long time ago, but the contents smelt OK and there was nothing crawling around in it, so I thought half a teaspoon wouldn't hurt us, before throwing the rest away and adding cornflour to the shopping list. I made sure the cornflour was thoroughly cooked, but the compote tasted rather mere to me, and in a fit of doubt I doubled up on the amount of jam.
The courgette bake turned out to be more of a performance than I was expecting, once I read the recipe properly. I enjoyed those of the Two Greedy Italian programmes I saw on the telly, and got the book, thinking that recipes you could do in the back of a camper van couldn't be too complicated, but I'm not sure how much overlap there is between the TV and the book, other than the nice pictures of the two chefs and the Italian countryside. It turns out you have to coat the courgettes in beaten egg and flour and fry them, turning them into fritters before you even start assembling the bake. And my version may be a bit courgette heavy, because I didn't know how many slices of junior marrow equated to three courgettes.
Still, the way to avoid being bored by cooking as you rotate the six things you know how to cook is to try new things. Some become loved staples, and some are left as a once in a lifetime experience (Delia, I am thinking especially of your meatballs). So maybe the tart and the bake will be delicious, and maybe they won't be. But by tomorrow night I think we'll both be glad to retreat to the simplicity of a packet of sausages. Especially if the Systems Administrator cooks them.
No comments:
Post a Comment