Lamb Rogan Josh

Indian is by far one of my favourite cuisines and I know I’m not alone! The Indian often gives Chinese a run for its money in the country’s favourite take-away food.

When I was younger I didn’t ever eat Indian food. We’ve always been the kind of family that orders a takeaway for special occasions (like birthdays) or evenings where the routines gone out of the window (like parents evening for example). BUT the Indian takeaway leaflets were always left in the drawer until Mum and Dad were home alone.

I remember trying my first piece of Chicken Tikka. I had never tasted anything like it before! It was so new and different that I genuinely couldn’t tell if I liked it or not. I wanted to try more, but I was scared that my parents would order me a dish and I wouldn’t be able to finish it. After all, trying one piece of Chicken Tikka isn’t quite the same as sitting down to a plate of keema naan, pilau rice and a creamy curry.

It turns out my sister HATED her taste so that was that...I never really got a chance to try curry again properly until I was in my early teens. To this day I maintain I fell in love with Jon (AND cooking) because he cooked the best curries! Ok...we both know they were out of a jar, but I had never had a homemade curry until I started going for dinner at Jon’s house. They were always vegetarian (sometimes which extra quorn pieces) and served with fluffy basmati rice. That was it...I was hooked!

When I passed this news on to my parents it was decided we’d start ordering Indian take-aways as a family. No more Dominoes or Chinese. The Indian was king. By this point my sister was always round her boyfriends, so once a month on a Saturday night, I started working my way through the local curry house's menu.

As it turns out, I like ALL types of curries – from creamy Kormas and butter chickens, to spicy Jalfrezis. I also love garlic naans, peshwari naans, keema naans, chapattis, parathas, pilau rice, lemon rice...basically there isn’t ONE thing on the menu I don’t like. Sometimes I’ll order lamb, sometimes chicken, sometime prawn and sometimes veggie. No curry is off limits.

Despite saying this, one curry has had a special place in my heart all these years. The Rogan Josh.

I don’t actually remember when this became my “go-to” curry but if we were ordering in a hurry or weren’t ordering a giant Indian feast, I’d simply order a Rogan Josh. I loved the rich sauce with tomatoes and green peppers mopped up with a keema naan – to me it was heaven!

Until my post on a Low Fat Chicken Korma I hadn’t tried recreating my take-away favourites at home. I have no friends or family from India who could teach me all their secrets, and I just can’t justify using ghee in my home cooking (I swear I would weigh a tonne overnight!) So I’ve always steered clear.

But, in my pursuit of delicious tasting healthy foods I decided it was time I tried to crack the Rogan Josh.

Rogan Josh is the signature dish of the Kashmir region and is traditionally cooked with lamb. The sauce or gravy is based on browned onions yoghurt, garlic, ginger and spices such as cloves, bay leaves, cardamom and cinnamon all of which you'll find in my recipe. The red colour of the sauce traditionally comes from dried Kashmiri chilies. These can be replaced by paprika which has a similar flavour - again you'll find this in my recipe below. It is not a really hot dish, but instead should be fragrant with a slight chilli heat rather than a kick.

Indian take-aways in countries such as England also include the addition of tomatoes. This gives it a less traditional flavour but also helps bring out the red colour found in the Kashmiri dish.

My recipe falls somewhere in between the two. It has the tomatoes and green peppers that I know so well from my local take-away, but the spices used are very traditional. I’ve also cut down on much of the oil needed to cook the lamb and baked it in the oven for a tender texture so it’s not as unhealthy for you as the take-away variety.

If you have never tried cooking “take-away style” curries at home before, this is a great recipe to start with! You will get a smoother gravy or sauce if you have a blender to hand but it’s not essential, and this can be served with rice or traditional breads.

Here’s the recipe:

[Review + Recipe] LovePickle and Low Fat Chicken Korma

NB. A jar of this product was given to me free for me to review. All opinions are my own!

Hey everybody! Today I’m brining you a double post – half review half recipe. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that I’ve been quite quiet on the blogging front recently, and not without good reason. Throughout February I was taking some very important law exams. Results don’t come out for ages yet, but I don’t think I had any disasters. I’ve also been on holiday! Just two days after I finished the last of my six exams, Mr KG and I hopped on a plane to Prague and I’ve just got back from a lovely long weekend filled with food, drink, sightseeing and Jazz. I hope to do a post on my trip soon as I discovered lots about the city that I would like to share (and not just restaurant recommendations). I’ll also be trying to recreate a dish I had while I was out there.

Over the last month or so I’ve also been inundated with requests from brands and PR firms. There have been so many I couldn’t possibly (and wouldn’t want to) say yes to them all. LovePickle however was a brand I was more than happy to give a try...

I was instantly intruiged by LovePickle because they looked like a fresh and funky company selling one of my favourite things – Indian pickles. They kindly offered me a (free) jar to review: all I had to do was decide the heat! (Mild, medium, hot and extra hot). I went for hot, and was pretty confident I could stand the heat.

One of the things that instantly drew me to the pickle, was that I wasn’t bombarded with an array of fancy flavours. Now they say variety is the spice of life, but it’s never a good thing to be a jack of all trades and master of none. The LovePickle pickle is handmade from ripe tomatoes, fresh chillies, garlic, ginger, mustard oil and seeds plus a selection of carefully selected quality herbs and spices. They have perfected their recipe only ever tweaking the heat of the finished product so that they know the taste is the best it can be every time.

LovePickle stress how it can be used in a whole variety of ways – either served with poppadoms and naan bread, as an accompaniment to main courses or as an alternative to chutneys, relishes and ketchups. So far I’ve served it up alongside a variety of home-made currys, and it goes particularly well with the korma which I am sharing with you below.

So what did I really think of the pickle? You can most definitely tell that it is a tomato based pickle, and I must admit I usually opt for lime or other fruit based pickles with my meals. However, unlike some, this pickle is not too sweet. You get a rich, deep tomato flavour as a base which the spices and chilli heat is built on top of. It is a very well rounded pickle and I think this is what makes it so versatile! I would happily serve this as a dip for crisps at a party, or alongside poppadoms and curries at dinner time.

Priced at £2.95 a jar it is a little more pricey that the likes of Patak’s or Sharwoods, but the quality is far far far superior. I couldn’t fault the sample I was given. (Except that it didn’t automatically refill itself! With a hungry family I think the jar only last 4 meals.)

If you want to try the pickle for yourself you can find the whole range on the LovePickle website. or follow their facebook or twitter pages (@Lovepickle_uk).

Now, on to the korma I’ve been serving alongside this pickle!

The Indian takeaway is one of the nation’s most loved dishes. But with many recipes including ghee or copious amounts of oil, the kind of curry that gets delivered to your door is also filled with extra fat and calories you just don’t need.

I’ve been cooking my own curries for years now, but never have I even tried to recreate a “take-away” style curry before, until now. Low-fat creamy sauces have become a bit of a ‘thing’ of mine recently and I’ve been trying to find ways to recreate indulgent dishes with less of the fat. This korma is another attempt at doing just that!

It is delicately spiced, with all the traditional spices you would expect to find in a take-away korma, however, by replacing cream with crème fraiche, and by using a food processer to get a thick and creamy base for my sauce I am able to bring a taste of India into your kitchen.

The tumeric and saffron give the sauce a brilliant yellowy colour in true take-away style so you don't feel you're missing out on any part of the experience.

This recipe also creates a good helping of the creamy sauce, so is great for mopping up with a sweet peshwari naan, wholesome chappathi or vegetable stuffed paratha!

Sound too good to be true? Give this recipe a go and let me know how you get on.