First Meal in my New Flat

I'm back!!! I finally have internet in my new flat so I have loads to share with you... There's still some meals from my trip around Eastern Europe and a family holiday to Pollenca and, of course, tons of recipes from my own cooking and books!

I thought the best place to start would be the first meal I cooked in my new kitchen... it's a lovely open plan kitchen/dining/living room - perfect for entertaining as I can cook while still chatting to my friends! So the dish is just a very simple Chicken Tikka Masala - not fancy but absolutely fool proof and very tasty! So welcome back everyone, pour a glass of wine and enjoy the recipe!

 

Chicken Tikka Masala

Serves 3 (great for 2 people with leftovers for the freezer!)

olive oil
2 chicken breasts

1 onion (I used red this time but I normally use white)
large tablespoon of tikka masala paste
2/3 cup of rice
1 red pepper
6-8 mushrooms
tin of chopped tomatoes
handful of flaked almonds (optional)
handful of fresh coriander leaves
1 naan bread
2 tablespoons of natural yoghurt (optional)



Chop all of the ingredients and get a pan of water boiling ready for your rice.

Put a deep frying pan on a medium heat and add a dash of olive oil. Add the chicken and fry until it has turned white.

Add the onion. As the onion softens add the tikka masala paste and stir until it is covering all of the chicken.

Cook the rice according to packet instructions (I usually put it on at this stage and the timings tend to work well).

Add the peppers and mushrooms to the pan and fry for a few minutes, mixing with the chicken, onions and paste.

As the veg softens, add the tin of chopped tomatoes, most of the almonds and coriander. Leave to simmer and absorb all of the flavours for about 5 minutes. If you are serving with naan bread then put it in a preheated oven.

If you want a creamier curry then add natural yoghurt, but it is still delicious without!

Drain and serve your rice and spoon on your curry. Sprinkle the remaining almonds and coriander over the dishes and eat!



So there you have it... the simple and tasty dish that I made for my friend as the first meal in my new kitchen! It's a really great basic recipe that you can mix up with different meats, different veg and chilli if you want to add some more spice - delicious with spinach added towards the end of cooking if you fancy a tikka saag!

A good one for a Saturday evening if you fancy making it tonight or it can even be a fairly quick mid-week meal... have a lovely weekend folks and enjoy!

Saturday Night Curry... Tasty Lamb Rogan Josh

 My Recipe for a simple Lamb Rogan Josh

A tasty curry I made for dinner on Saturday night with red pepper and spinach, washed down with a cold ginger beer... yum!

I took the recipe for marinating the lamb from a Jamie Oliver Recipe, but then decided to simplify the rest of the ingredients and cooking methods just because we were hungry and wanted to eat!!

I had no chilli so didn't make mine very spicy - but if you like spice then just add 1 or 2 in with the red pepper. The Pataks curry pastes are really good for making quick, flavoursome curries when you don't want to bother with all the spices yourself...

So if you want a simple, tasty recipe, this is the one. If you're after something with a bit more depth and preparation, then head over to Jamie's recipe - it will make a truly delicious curry I'm sure!!
 

 

Ingredients

Makes 3 portions

Marinade
2cm square piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 large tablespoons low fat natural yoghurt
black pepper

Curry
3 lamb steaks, cut into big cubes
2 tablespoons Pataks Rogan Josh curry paste
1 red onion, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped (optional)
tin of chopped tomatoes
2 handful spinach leaves
small handful fresh coriander, chopped


rice, naan, poppadoms, mango chutney, iced cold ginger beer... whatever you fancy, to serve!

Method

Combine all the ingredients for the marinade in a plastic tupperware or bowl. Add the lamb and mix to coat all of the meat. Leave in the fridge overnight or as long as you have time for.


Add the curry paste into a deep frying pan (or wok). Fry for a couple of minutes on a medium heat until the oils begin to leak out of the paste, then add the onion, red pepper and chilli (if using).

As the onion begins to soften, add the lamb and marinade and mix to combine the flavours.





Pour in the chopped tomatoes and a small cup of water (if needed). Add the spinach leaves and mix as they soften. Add most of the fresh coriander.

Put a lid on the curry and leave to simmer away on the hob or slow cook in the oven (ideally on a low-medium heat for a couple of hours). You want the lamb to be cooked through but still tender.

Cook your rice and naan as the curry is in the oven. Serve with extra coriander sprinkled on if desired. Enjoy!

Anjum Anand's Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

Anjum Anand 'I Love Curry'

This colourful curry book, published by Quadrille, has gorgeous full page photographs for every recipe. I'm quite a visual person so I like to see what my dish is (hopefully!) going to look like, and I often pick to cook recipes with a photo over those without.

The dishes all sound delicious, and I think I picked one of the least exciting ones (not out of choice, but down to the stock left in my Sainsbury's local at 7pm on a Tues!) - I certainly plan to cook my way through most of these.

With sections on 'To Start: Bites', 'The Curries' and 'Accompaniments', this book offers an easy meal plan as I always love to make a starter if I'm cooking for someone or for an occasion. And the curries and accompaniments are then broken down into several different chapters, so you can pick to suit ingredients you may have already got in the fridge.

I often whip up a curry with one of the Pataks curry pastes and either some chopped tomatoes or coconut milk... and this produces a consistently tasty curry. But this is a lovely, well laid out book, that I can see myself using every time I want to spend a bit more time over making a curry and fancy some more interesting flavours. (I should just say that I'm really not a fan of the cover - I think the colour combination makes the book look cheap and in-authentic, which it's not - but under the dust-jacket is a plain mint green that looks much much nicer!!)

Light Cumin-Flavoured Chicken Curry

... in my case it was a turkey curry, but that's because I was making it on a budget! I think it would have been much more flavoursome with the chicken on the bone, as recommended in the recipe, but hey, it was pretty good anyway!

I also chose to add green pepper, because I wanted to bulk it out a little and so that we had a bit of variety as I was simply doing this with naan bread as a late dinner for me and a friend.


It's a long recipe so I won't write it out, but basically marinade the chicken/turkey in a mixture of plain yoghurt, garlic, ginger, ground cumin and ground coriander... and leave (for much longer than the 10mins I did!)

 Fry off the onion and cumin seeds, then add garam masala, chillies (and pepper).

 Add the marinaded meat.

 Add water and simmer. Add fresh coriander (which Sainsbury's had unfortunately run out of!) and serve.

Anjum Anand words it much better than that, and there are a lot of details that I have missed out, but this is the general idea!  And the result was good - maybe not 'the best Indian curry I'll ever cook' - but light, simple and tasty. A definite one for the future.

Birthday Meal at Thai Square, Covent Garden

The restaurant

My favorite food is Thai... Thai curries, Thai spiced fish and meat, Thai veggies, Thai everything! I love the fresh zingy flavours and the fact that you can absolutely stuff your face and still feel reasonably healthy!

So I was extremely pleased that my lovely fella took me to a Thai restaurant for my birthday Saturday night. We ordered far too much food and ate all of it, and I think my only real negative for the evening was where we were sitting... because the food was fantastic!

The picture above (taken from Thai Square website as I forgot my camera! http://thaisquareserver.co.uk/) doesn't really show how richly decorated the place is inside. And unfortunately, we couldn't really appreciate the decor from our seats either. We were sat right at the front of the restaurant, not the very first row of tables so you're sat next to the window, but the next row back kind of tucked away in a corner. This was mildly frustrating as we booked way in advance, knowing it was a Sat night in London, and we were hoping to be right in the middle of all the atmosphere towards the back of the restaurant. But hey, we stopped caring as soon as we had a glass of white wine and Singha beer in front of us!

The Food

We always always have the sharing platter if there's an option; both love to taste a few different things for a starter/ can never pick which dish we want to try more! I can honestly say that this was the best Thai sharing platter I've ever had... the chicken satay was rich in flavour with the right amount of crunch; the Thai fish cakes were flavourful yet delicate... and just yummy; the duck spring rolls had a beautifully crispy filo pastry with plenty of stuff in the middle; the prawn tempura was so juicy with the lightest batter... probably my favorite one of this dish; and the Thai Dim Sum dissolved into flavour in my mouth. So off to a fantastic start, I wish I had a photo for you! The only thing that it was maybe missing was a funky shaped carrot so I could mop up the different sauces!!

For mains we had a monk fish green curry from the chefs specials, which was delicious. I very often go for a green curry and every time after ordering I think 'damn it I should have had something different'. And then it comes and the taste is just that good, that I know I'll order it again next time! Having monk fish was a special treat though, and it was seriously good, flake in the mouth stuff!

We also had beef Pad Kee Mao - spicy noodles... And damn they were spicy!! It does warn on the menu and normally we're both pretty good with hot flavours, but wow, I think we over estimated our love for hot food here. We both continued to eat it and the beef was delicious, but there were several rather large chunks of chilli that were blow your head off hot, and kind of stole away from the other flavours. Definitely did not ruin the meal though, and gave us quite a giggle at how bad we were at picking dishes!

We picked very well for our third and final main course dish, however... a dish they call Drunken Duck (battered marinated duck topped with home-made special whiskey sauce). It was unbelievably good - a teeny bit fatty as would be expected from duck, but the crunch of the batter was enough to keep the texture from feeling stodgy. But the flavour... oh the flavour... it somehow reminded me of American food, but only the stuff we love about American food, and having the fresh, zingy flavours of Thai food stopped it from being, well, y'know... American! There was something very satisfying about the mixture of traditional Thai green curry and this dish, that I wouldn't have immediately recognised as Thai, but that was quite simply, yummy!!!

So after all of that, we were just too full for any dessert and had to waddle back home. It was a lovely meal, slight shame about the setting, but I'd certainly go back. The menu was vast and had a load of other dishes I'd love to try, like the chef special Goong Fai Dang (Prawns with Whiskey) and some of their salads, so a definite one for the future. There are also several Thai Square retaurants dotted about London, so maybe next time I'll try a different one to mix it up!