Indian Saturday #2: Saag aloo

Along with the rogan josh I also dished up saag aloo.

I bought Gordon Ramsay’s Great Escape the other week and until I saw a photo of him in a vest started to quite fancy him. Which is irrelevant but I needed to share.

For this you need:
400g of fresh spinach
600g of potatoes (preferably floury ones such as Maris Piper)
1 teaspoon of black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon of onion seeds (I couldn’t find these so left them out…)
3 cloves of garlic
1 green chilli
1 teaspoon of salt
½ a teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1 onion
Lemon juice
Gordon Ramsay’s recipe also has a pinch of asafoetida (this is a spice that comes from the gum of the Ferula asafoetida plant. Tiny amounts are used as a digestive aid – oooh check me out!)

Before I begin I’d like to give a quick word of warning about cayenne pepper (or as Charlotte and I insist on calling it: Kanye pepper. “I’m gunna let you finish, but Imtiaz Qureshi makes the best curry of all time!”)
The pepper was tightly packed in the jar when I tried to measure it out onto a teaspoon which meant I had to shake it about a bit and got some on my hands. I’m very cautious when I use chillies and things so washed them straight away. This didn’t stop a bit making its way just under my thumb nail. I washed my hands in freezing water eight times to try and make the burning stop but to no avail. By midnight, four hours later, the intense fiery pain had let up slightly but even last night there was still a horrible lava-hot feeling when I touched anything. So be incredibly careful with this sodding stuff.

Wilt the spinach in a pan of boiling salted water for one minute. Drain it in a colander and rinse with cold water to perk it up a bit. Squeeze out all the lovely looking greenish water and roughly chop. Stick these to one side until everything else is done.

Finely chop the garlic, deseed the chilli and do the same. Cut the onion in half and finely slice this too. Peel the potatoes and chop them in to cubes.

I used a medium sized pan for this which I think was a lot easier than the frying pan the recipe suggests. Heat the oil and add the mustard and onion seeds (and asafoetida if you’ve managed to find any). The seeds start to pop when they get hot which is marvellous fun and once this happens throw in the onion, garlic and the chilli. After three or four minutes dump the potatoes in and shake the salt and cayenne pepper over them to season. Stir these around a lot while they fry on a high heat for a few minutes.

Pour in four or five tablespoons of water and stick a lid on it. Lower the heat and cook for twenty minutes to half an hour depending on the size of the diced potatoes. You need to keep moving this around so the potatoes don’t stick. I stirred mine and they broke up quite a bit so shaking the pan would probably be a better idea. Just like the curry if it seems too dry add a splash more water.

Chuck in the spinach and a squeeze of lemon juice and gently stir it all in. Let the spinach heat up for a minute or two, move to a bowl and stick in front of a hungry friend.

Indian Saturday #1: Rogan josh

On Saturday night I went what I can only describe as mental and decided to knock up a couple of Indian dishes for Charlotte and myself.

First up is rogan josh from Anjum Anand’s Anjum’s New Indian.

The list of ingredients looks incredibly long (especially when you’re wondering around Waitrose with an A4 shopping list) but when it comes to cooking it actually doesn’t seem too bad.

750g of lamb or mutton, cut into chunks
3 or 4 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 blade of mace
7 black peppercorns
3 cloves
2 black cardamom pods
5 green cardamom pods (I could only find green ones so used 7 of those)
5cm of a cinnamon stick
A large onion
2 medium tomatoes
12g of fresh ginger
6 large cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of ground fennel seeds
2 teaspoons of ground coriander
1 teaspoon of red chilli powder
2 teaspoons of ground cumin
1 and a half teaspoons of garam masala
A pinch of salt
3 tablespoons of natural yoghurt
Fresh coriander

It won’t come as a shock to anyone that even with a bit of prep I managed to miss out the cloves and put all the spices in at the wrong time. Charlotte hit the nail on the head when she said “It’s not the best curry I’ve ever had but it’s still tasty.” I’d say that as she ate her body weight it must have been okay but by the time I served it up she was hungry enough to have eaten it off the floor had I dropped it.

So you have the ginger and garlic mix to hand while you’re cooking I’d do this before you start.
Chop the garlic and throw it in a blender and add the peeled and chopped ginger. Keep the chunks quite big or they’ll get lost under the blades like mine did. Add a slosh of water and whiz until you have a paste.

The tomatoes need to be puréed so I’d suggest using tinned ones. I was using fresh, uncooked and unskinned tomatoes at it wasn’t half a job. The 1980s kitchen equipment came out (with the usual story from my mother about how it’s older than me… maybe) and the tomatoes got ineffectively schmooshed in a bowl. They then went through a sieve but somehow there were still strips of skin in there. This wasn’t end of the world but strangely enough it’s probably better to do it properly.

Put both of these to one side and heat the oil in a large non-stick pan. Throw in the peppercorns, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and the mace. The recipe very clearly says ‘add the whole spices’ but I, in my true village idiot style, put all the spices in. Fry the spices until they sizzle and then add the onion. Cook this until it’s browned and then add the lamb, stirring until it’s also browned all over.

Pour in the garlic and ginger and lower the heat. Stir it about for a couple of minutes and the garlic should start smelling like it’s cooked. In goes the ground coriander, cumin, fennel, chilli powder, salt and garam masala. Stir this for just under a minute.

I couldn’t find any powdered fennel so Charlotte was given my make-shift pestle and mortar (plastic bowl, rolling pin) and told to crush away.

After the last of the spices go in add the tomatoes and turn the heat up. This then cooks for fifteen minutes and needs stirred once in a while. If it starts to dry up too fast add a splash of hot water.

After the fifteen minutes mine was still quite watery. I’m not sure it should be as the recipe says ‘add enough water to come halfway up the meat’ but never mind. Bring the curry to the boil and then turn the heat down quite low. Simmer for around 35-45 minutes until the meat is lovely and tender. The liquid should reduce into a thick gravy. Stir in the yoghurt before bringing back to the boil. Remove it from the heat, mix in a handful of roughly chopped coriander and serve.

Pizza chez Grub

For the past year or so my friend Grub and I have sat down every few weeks, ordered a pizza from Clever Wally’s Raw Pizza (they deliver it, you cook it. Yep - doesn’t seem to make sense I know.) and stuck the DVD player on. We’ve made our way through Rome and the first series of the Sopranos but times have changed: Grub now knows how to make pizza bases.

After cooking a roast in his fully functioning oven I have been desperate to cook at Grub’s again. Not least because the ice cream maker he bought me lives there. On Thursday I stormed round with posh ham and olives ready to be taught the delicate art of pizza-making.

Two decent-sized pizza bases need:
250g of strong white flour
A pinch of salt
15g of yeast
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 spoon of clear honey
150ml of hand-warm water

You need whatever cheese takes your fancy and a tomato sauce. On the suggestion of pizza-master Grub Smith three toppings is the limit or the whole thing turns out a bit soggy.

Mix the yeast, flour and salt together slowly adding the water, oil and the honey until the dough comes away from the side of the bowl. Flour a surface and knead the dough for a while to get the air out, until it’s a bit firmer.

I took absolutely dozens of pictures of all of this excitement on Grub’s camera so I don’t think they’ll ever see the light of day. Which is a pity as there’s a charming one of me in a Paul Newman apron given to Grub by the man himself. All the photos were taken on my phone which is why they're a bit off.

Shove the ball of dough into a bowl with a tiny bit of oil and cover it with some clingfilm. Stick the bowl in a warm oven for an hour so the dough rises. Honestly, rising dough will never stop making me clap and jump around like an arse.



Flour a surface and knead the dough again for about ten minutes. Shape the dough into a ball and flour a rolling pin. Roll the dough out into a thin twelve inch disk. While the base might look quite flimsy it’ll rise while you cook it.



Heat the oven at about 200°c while you top the pizza. Spoon over some tomato sauce and if you’re feeling fancy some sun-dried tomatoes. Add the cheese and whatever else you want and stick it on some greaseproof paper in the oven for about ten minutes. Being the modern, go-getting guy he is Grub has a pizza stone - which is, essentially, a round bit of stone you bake pizzas on - but I imagine a baking tray would work just as well.

My bog standard pizza had:
Cheddar, three tonnes of black olives and rather a lot of red onion.


Grub’s rather posh pizza had:
Sun-dried tomatoes, a little cheddar, a little grated parmesan, goat’s cheese, mushrooms, prosciutto, olives and red onion. (He clearly doesn’t follow his three-topping rule but what’re you going to do?)

Bread

I’ve been shamed in to even more baking. A horrified beautician was aghast at my breadlessness. “But everyone can make bread!” she whispered. She has a point but then again that’s what everyone said about biscuits and look how that turned out.

Bread is something I had already thought about after handing over twenty odd quid in a week to Pret for a baguette. If I could master bread I could make sandwiches! Of course normal people go to the shops and buy a loaf of Hovis but I’m not one to make life easy for myself.

For a small brown loaf you need:
285g of wholemeal bread flour
1 teaspoon of yeast
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of clear honey
200ml of hand-warm water
1 tablespoon of olive oil

The water needs to be warm enough to activate the yeast but not hot enough to kill it. Stick your finger in and if it’s as warm as you are that should do it.

Put the flour, yeast and salt into a bowl, give it a stir and make a well in the middle. Mix the water, honey and olive oil together and with a wooden spoon work this in to the flour bit by bit until it’s all quite wet. I thought mine seemed quite soggy but the end result was a bit heavy and dry so you can be quite generous with the liquid.

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and leave somewhere warm for at least an hour so the dough rises.

As I’m basically six at heart things magically getting bigger on their own is marvellous.

Heat the oven to 200°c / gas mark 6, grease a bread tin and spoon the dough in, levelling it out. I don’t know why you don’t knead this as when I asked my mum (who was showing me how to do it) she howled "You just don’t NEED TO!" and I left it at that.

Put the bread in the oven for forty minutes. To check that it’s done slide it out of the tin onto a clean cloth and rap your knuckles on the bottom. If it sounds hollow it’s ready.

Now I just need to start liking sandwiches…

Blueberry muffins

Nigella and I have fallen out.

You wouldn’t think so from the picture above. You’d think “Mmm! Home-made blueberry muffins! Made by following a Nigella Lawson recipe to the letter.” Unfortunately then you’d want to eat them. And you’d take a bite and think “BLUUUURGH! What have I just put in my mouth? Sweet mother of Christ what is this?! How long until I can get rid of the taste of salt?”
And the answer is about 10 minutes.

As Waitrose had an offer on blueberries I got two punnets when I was buying ingredients for my cheesecake. So to use these up I thought I’d give muffins a whiz. I found a recipe on www.nigella.com and as they’re described as ‘the best blueberry muffins’ I got cooking.

And they probably would have been the best blueberry muffins had I not read ‘3 / 4 tsp salt’ as three to four teaspoons of salt. To be fair I only used two but if you want to say three quarters say ¾. God. Some people…


Here is the recipe for a competent person:

300g of blueberries though I used around 400 to finish them off
280g of self raising flower
67g of sugar
2 teaspoons of baking powder
THREE QUARTERS OF A TEASPOON of salt
2 eggs
4 tablespoons of butter, melted
175ml milk

Wash the blueberries in a sieve and place them on a floured tea towel. To coat them slightly bundle them up and give them a gentle shake around. Leave these to dry for about half an hour though I found mine fine by the time I had finished my batter.

Preheat the oven to 170°c/gas mark 7 and sieve the flour, sugar, baking soda and THREE QUARTERS OF A TEASPOON of salt in to a bowl. Once you pour the wet stuff in you only want to stir it ten to fifteen times or the muffins will be very tough so rather than having layers of flour etc mix it around now.

Beat the eggs in another bowl adding in first the butter and then the milk. Make a well in your dry ingredients and quickly stir everything in as much as you can with those few precious strokes. Don’t worry too much about lumps and throw in the blueberries, folding them in once or twice.

Dollop about a spoon and a half of the batter in to muffin cases, filling them up about two thirds of the way. Put them in the oven for about 15 to 20 minutes until they’re golden brown on top. Put them on a rack to cool and unlike mine eat them when they’re room temperature.

Cheesecake #2

The first thing I ever consciously decided to make and the first thing I wrote about on here was a cheesecake. It was a horrible, floury mess that hadn’t really set and it made me think that this whole idea was stupid and awful. Which, of course, it is - but that hasn’t stopped me so far. Since then as soon as anything starts to go even slightly wrong I am taken back to the dreadful moment I tasted that bloody cake and I have to take a deep, cleansing breath before I can carry on.

I am neither a very good nor very competent cook: I leave ingredients out by accident, my oven doesn’t work very well and I tend to leave stuff on the stove for too long while I finish a cigarette. However the last few things I have made have turned out at least half way decent and this has given me a bit of a confidence boost. Ready to face my nemesis I bought some cream cheese and rolled up my sleeves.

For blueberry cheesecake you need:
150g of blueberries
500g of low fat cream cheese
75g of unsalted butter
397g (one tin) of condensed milk
3 eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
The zest of one lemon
200g of digestive biscuits

To make the base you need to crush the biscuits. I think the best way to do this is to put them in a sandwich bag and break them up by hand. It’s probably easier to use a rolling pin but what could be better than an edible stress ball?

On a low heat melt the butter in a large pan but don’t let it get too hot. Pour in the digestive crumbs and stir it all up. It seems like a tiny amount of butter but you only need to dampen the biscuit bits to get them to stick together. Spoon the base into a shallow nine inch cake tin (or whatever size mine is) and press it down very firmly. I used a wooden spoon for this as you can get right against the edge and flatten it out. Shove this in the fridge for 20 minutes to chill. The one thing I’m not looking forward to about summer is being unable to shove things (beer) outside to keep cold when I need space in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 170°c/gas mark 3 and while your base is taking up valuable booze space in the fridge mix the cream cheese in a large bowl until it’s soft. This takes all of 30 seconds and after that whisk in the eggs, lemon zest, vanilla and condensed milk.

Condensed milk is one of the most horrible things I have ever seen. It looks like very sweet living room paint and it just oozes. I have no idea why it was ever invented. Yes it keeps for ever but God, why would you want it to?

At this point the first cheesecake I made was a thick, creamy mix that smelt exactly like something you’d get in a coffee shop (or with a pube in it from my local Co-op). This time I just had a slightly yellow cream. This worried me a bit but remembering how promising the last one seemed I pushed this to the back of my mind and kept whisking.

Pour this onto the base and scatter the blueberries over the top. I plopped mine in as I’m clearly easily amused and liked the way they bobbed. I used far fewer blueberries than 150g but looking back I probably should have used at least that as they are what sweetens it.

Put your cake in the oven for an hour, a tiny bit longer if it’s still not firm. When you take it out place it on a rack to cool and definitely put it in the fridge for a while.

Mine seemed rather sticky on top and I couldn’t get it out of the tin. Though this was down to my sheer incompetence rather than the cake. As I started to slice it - and badly scratch my cake tin in the process - the fear set in. My hand shook as I tipped a wedge onto a plate. I watched on tenterhooks as my mum took a bite. “Ooh. Tastes a lot like flour, doesn’t it?" she lied. As my face fell she cackled and proceeded to hoover up two large pieces.


If anyone would like to adopt me into a safe and loving home I would be very grateful.