Butternut Squash and Coconut Curry

Butternut Squash and Coconut Curry served with chapattis!

They say that owners look like their pets (I’m hoping to be the owner of a pug soon...does this mean I look like a pug?!)

They also say men marry women who look like their mothers (does that mean Mr KG thinks I look like his Mum?!)

But what does the food someone eats or cooks say about them?



Self portrait?

I often think that people who cook exotic food must be reasonably well travelled. There’s a big difference between someone who likes to order the odd Chinese or curry and someone who cooks pasta from scratch, or has an authentic recipe for lamb tagine.

And so I wonder – what do the recipes on this blog say about me?!

Unfortunately I am nowhere near as well travelled as I would like to be. I have been to all of the obvious places in Europe – France, Spain, Germany and Greece. I’ve also been to Prague. But that’s really where the extent of my “travelling” starts and stops.

From a young age I’ve had a desire to go to new places and when I wrote my first ever bucket list when I was 13 it included travelling to India, Japan, Russia and China. These are most definitely still the 4 places I would like to visit the most. Since beginning to learn Mandarin I feel like my dream to visit China is becoming more and more possible. I’d love to fit in a month long tour of China before I start my training contract but I just have to keep on hoping for now – after all a temporary job and a flat with Mr KG are way higher on my list of priorities.

I may not be well travelled but I am well eaten – if that’s even a saying! I’ve certainly tried my fair share of curries, some of which were more authentic than others.

Wherever I’ve lived (or Mr KG has lived) we’ve always been in pursuit of a good curry. I’ve also been fortunate enough in the past to have a friend from Bangladesh who’s Mum LOVED to cook us curries for revision sessions back during my A-Levels. Another friend spent a lot of time in Nepal and brought home recipes for authentic Nepalese curries.

Silky coconut curry with butternut squash, red chilli and lentils

One day I hope that I will be able to share a traditional recipe passed down to me on one of my travels, but that might be for a while yet.

Until then, all I can do is share with you a recipe for one of my favourite curries which I cook at home. The idea has come from a variety of dishes I’ve tried both at home and in restaurants so it may well be a twist on a classic, who knows!

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.

Review: Japanese Canteen, Holborn

Japanese Canteen – visited twice in the last month…will most definitely be back in the New Year!

83 High Holborn
London
WC1V 6LS
020 7405 4540

By way of introduction, Japanese Canteen kind of does what it says on the tin! It offers freshly cooked Japanese food in a canteen-style restaurant.

So…what more do you need to know?!

There are ten Japanese Canteens in total all over London. Now I haven’t had the pleasure of visiting any of them other than the Holborn branch just yet so I can’t comment on the restaurant business as a whole, but I can tell you a little bit about what to expect from the Holborn branch and why I will keep going back.

The first thing that caught my eye about Japanese Canteen, was not the branding or restaurant decoration (a bit more about that later), but that every morning when I was walking to Law School there would be crates and crates of fresh vegetables being delivered to their store. The website boasts how they cook hot fresh food daily and that ingredients are locally sourced. Though I can’t vouch for where the vegetables come from, they certainly are fresh! Brownie point number 1!

Chicken Katsu Curry!

The menu is also pretty extensive for such a small Canteen! Each shop has its own independent kitchen and therefore the menu may differ depending on which branch you are in. But the Holborn branch in particular can offer everything from freshly made sushi, bento boxes, katsu curry, donburi and more! You could keep going back every week for a year and I genuinely believe you would never get bored.

But it’s not just the variety on offer that impresses. The food is cooked at lightning speed to your order and comes beautifully presented. It’s piping hot because it’s been cooked and bought out to you so quickly and the tastes are amazing! Every component part of the dish seems to jump out at you as clean and fresh, yet they work so well together to form a complete flavour experience. This is what I love about Japanese food. They take just a few favours that they can deliver in a refined way so that they don’t lose any of their own personality when matched with other flavours.

The first time I went, I had their Chicken Chilli Fried Rice. If you aren’t a fan of chilli heat you may want to shy away from this one. But when I was suffering from a cold, this was exactly what I needed. I could taste the chilli, the spring onions, the chicken, ginger and more! It seemed like each flavour had picked one of my taste buds and was doing a little dance!

The portion sizes weren’t bad either! It was really busy when I first went in (it always is at lunch time) so I chose to take it away. By the time I got back to law school the food was still piping hot and had lost none of its pizazz. I don’t know whether they had been extra generous with my portion, or whether my cold had got the better of me, but I actually couldn’t bring myself to finish it! Something I hate doing when something tastes so good.

On my second visit just two weeks later I decided to visit the Canteen a little later on – around 2pm – to try and miss the lunch time rush. It worked! And on the plus side student discount can only be used after 2pm! (More on that later…)

I chose the Chicken Katsu Curry and waited for my order. One thing about it being a Canteen is that although they serve their dishes beautifully if you eat in, you still have to stand and wait at the counter to collect it! Would it really be that hard to get a member of staff to walk those extra five steps to serve at the table? The store is tiny!

Nonetheless, I wanted to see what all of the fuss is about with Katsu curry.

Freshers Foodie Tip #10 - Cut out the MEAT!

You may be a carnivore BUT meat is expensive, even if you buy the cheap and nasty veiny stuff – yuck!!! A veggie curry is just as nice as a chicken one, and is more authentic!

There are plenty of recipes on this site that you might want to try: 

• Lumaconi Alla Vodka
• Stuffed Butternut Squash with Cheese Muffins
• Garden Curry
• Spinach Lasagna Rolls
• Rice and Lentil Pilaf
• Spaghetti Puttanemma
• Lentil Lasagna
• Nepalese Curried Vegetables with Lentils
• Butternut Squash with Pine nut and Sage
• Veggie Tagine with Cous cous
• Veggie Stir Fry

You may not think a recipe missing meat will be nice, or fill you up, BUT you’d be COMPLETELY wrong.

Of course you can treat yourself every now and then! But don’t just live off cheap and nasty chicken. Get your protein from much cheaper sources - for example pulses!

Meatless Monday is huge in America, and is a brilliant place to start! Bring the next big food trend to your halls!

Nepalese Curried Vegetable with Lentils and Home-made Chapathis

A week ago, my family had an old friend come to stay. Her name is Aurelia, and when she was a child she came to stay with my family every year as an exchange student from France, in the hope that we would teach her some English! It’s a tradition my family has had for generations, her father staying with my grandparents when he was a child too!

I think it’s fair to say that in the time she’s spent with us she has taught us just as much as we’ve taught her!

When she came to stay this time round, she decided to teach me a new type of food – Nepalese. She visited Nepal for a couple of months and lived with a number of families eating their traditional food.

Below is our interpretation of the dishes she ate on her travel – as authentic as they can possibly be.

So here is Nepalese Curried Vegetables with Lentil and Home-made Chapathis! (aka chapattis, chapatis).

Chapathis are my new favourite thing to cook!  SO quick and easy, and good fun to make! (Though do not set your tea-towel on fire as I did!!!!!)

Saag Aloo

I CANNOT, get an Indian from the local take-away without ordering a side of saag aloo, I just love it! Saag Aloo is a Northern Indian dish made up of spinach (saag) and potatoes (aloo). I tried looking for a relatively authentic recipe on the internet that wasn't too fattening, and didn't include Ghee. After a few tweaks by myself, this is the recipe I came up with! It tasted really authentic, and was extremely easy to make!


You'll never need to order a take-away again!


Enjoy

Potato

10 Tips for The Beginner Cook

This is a blog post aimed at anyone who is starting to cook! I’ve included a few tips on cooking methods as well as a few simple recipes to get you started! Then you can have a go at the other recipes on my blog!

This is mainly aimed at students, whether you are going to uni for the first time in September, or you’re a fresher who’s fed up of pot noodles and frozen pizzas, this is the place to start!

I hope they help!