Most of the Indian cooking I do is based on my mum’s recipes. The problem is that they are guidelines rather than recipes so I don’t get consistently good results. Besides, I’ve eaten my mum’s food for most of my life. It’s time I tried something a bit different. I found some easy Indian recipes by Atul Kochar. I made his coconut fish curry and home-style lentils and sauteed some sprouts in an Indian style.

18 Oct 2012
Curried sprouts
Remove outer leaves of sprouts as usual, then parboil until they are about a minute away from becoming tender. Drain off, and when they are cool enough to handle, cut each sprout into 1-2mm thick slices. Take a non-stick pan with a lid and pop some mustard seeds in oil, then add tumeric, chilli, garlic and ginger paste. Stirfry the slice sprouts in this tempering, adding a little water to help with coating properly. Add salt to taste and knob of butter.

Usually onion soup is made with a dark stock such as beef, but the recipe I used called for chicken stock.

The recipe was from this book:

We wanted to go out for a meal on a Monday night so were quite limited for choice of restaurant – most of the best are closed on Sunday and Monday. Surprisingly the Michelin-starred Simpsons was open. This was our second visit and the food was marvellous. It wasn’t quite as imaginative as at L’Enclume, which is still the best one-starred restaurant I’ve been to, but Simpsons is local so defintely worth an occasional visit.

Made from fresh cooked beetroot and based on a Delia cheese scones recipe. I was excited to try out a variation on the plain cheese scone. It worked quite well.

I made these samosa tonight. They look good but the picture doesn’t reveal the lack of crispiness in the cases. I phoned my mum after I’d made them to find out why the cases turned out more chewy than crispy and she told me I was supposed to make the dough with some oil in it. I have used oil in samosa dough before but because I’ve been in a breadmaking mindset lately, tonight I made my samosa dough in the same way as bread dough i.e. without fat. Doh!

Other points to note: As with all potato-based food, the filling needs a reasonable amount of salt. The pastry also need salting and some lemon juice too. I tried cider vinegar as an alternative but it wasn’t as good.

1 Feb 2013
I made samosa tonight using the recipe in the Indian Vegetarian Cooking book. I’ve found that you can cut down the oil in the dough by a sixth. Also, add the juice of half a lemon when doubling the book’s recipe for tasty and crispy pastry. Also, instead of making neat parcels how Mum taught me, I just made quarter-circle shaped ones by simply folding over a semicircle in half and gluing and pinching together the edges. This makes them visually bigger and gives lovely crispy edges. They seem to cook quicker too, I suppose because there aren’t any double layers of pastry. Next time I might try trying them with the lid on to see if that makes any difference.

3 Feb 2013
Now that I’ve perfected the pastry I have found that the samosa are best freshly fried. They don’t ever get quite as crispy when reheated in the oven. I could part fry them but it would be best to fry them just before serving.

Used a Jamie Oliver recipe for roast carrots tonight. It worked quite well.

Baking is a good activity when it’s too cold to play outside. I use one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s chocolate recipes for choc chip cookies (scroll down to the bottom of the article).

EDIT 06/06/12@: To get squidgy cookies, whip them out of the oven as soon as the outer edge has coloured. Mr W prefers them crunchy like biscuits though, so for him they need to stay in a bit longer. Add 50g of chopped nuts for a nutty variation.

I also made some bread. It’s nowhere near as good as Waitrose bakery bread but I enjoy producing a loaf purely by hand.