Chicken Curry – the Pakistani Way
Who doesn’t love a curry? And the more authentic the better. My friend Fadia, whose family is originally from Pakistan, taught me how to make this smooth sauce. I’m not saying this is truly authentic, but it certainly tastes good, and can be used with chicken, lamb, or a mixture of vegetables. It can be frozen, either just as the sauce or with the meat, so it’s very practical to have as a family-meal standby. You can even throw cooked meat into the sauce and use up the Christmas Turkey leftovers. This is always popular with children, maybe because it’s faintly sweet. My own adore it, and visiting kids, even those who aren’t keen on spicy food, also wolf it down. It isn’t hot, you can keep the spice level as low as you like it by using a bit less of the chilli powder. I give the recipe to make your own curry spice mixture, which I like because I just love a lot of turmeric, but it is pretty much as good if you use a ready mixed curry powder instead of all the different ground spices. Serves 4. Timings – 30 minutes preparation, 30 minutes simmering
Make the sauce: In a heavy saucepan, fry the onions, chilli, garlic and ginger until softened. Add the fennel seeds, stir and cook. Mix the powdered spices in a glass with a little water to a soft paste, then add to the pan. Stir and cook for about 2 minutes to let the flavours mature. Scrape the whole lot into the bowl of a liquidiser and add the other sauce ingredients to the liquidiser, including the fresh coriander if using. Blend until smooth. Add salt and pepper, taste the seasoning, adjust and blend again. At this stage, you can freeze the sauce, or put it in a bowl in the fridge and keep it until needed. You can use it with chicken, or paneer, or a mix of fried vegetables. Fry the chicken meat in the pan you used to make the sauce – you might need to do this in two batches to allow the meat to brown rather than release all the juices and just stew in juice. When all the meat has been lightly browned, add the sauce back in. Cook for about 30 minutes, simmering. It is actually better if left to cool down and heated up again, so I often make this on a Saturday morning, and then leave it to be eaten that evening. It keeps well in the fridge for 2-3 days, so you can make it on Saturday and leave it in the fridge for Tuesday. Serve with rice, naan, a cucumber/mint relish and a tomato/onion relish.
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Lemon Drizzle Cake
A favourite with my Seniors Lunch Club group, and one I have reserved for our last ever (we very much hope) round of deliveries and audio conference call. We are having two weeks off for Easter and then meeting in person again from mid April. I will continue to bake and take it along for the meetings, at which we will be able to have a sandwich and a hot drink from our Neighbourhood Centre. We talked about Easter celebrations. People are looking forward to going to church and have booked to attend church services. Our members who gave up a luxury for Lent are anticipating eating chocolate or cake again. Memories of rolling eggs – either hard boiled eggs rolled down a hill (pursued by dogs) or rolling chocolate eggs in the house, to symbolise the rolling of the stone away from the mouth of the tomb. Eggs were painted and eaten or blown and then painted and hung on flowering branches. We also looked back on the last year of meeting as a telephone conference call. I cannot adequately express how proud we are of our group – members and volunteers together have persevered, sustained each other, contributed good sense and good spirits to our weekly meetings and had a great time and a lot of laughs in the process. We’ve enjoyed talking about topics as diverse as Garden Birds, Lighthouses, Art & Design, Australia and Cartoons. We’ve played Who Am I? games, guessing our characters of animals, Christmas personalities and romantic couples. We’ve read out Limericks, Christmas Cracker Jokes and poems about Snow, and we’ve had birthday, Christmas and VE Day parties. We miss our friend Ruth, who passed away in this year, but we’re grateful to have had her in our group. Inspirational people. This recipe is another one from Pam Corbin’s book: Cakes, River Cottage Handbook No. 8. She says that this recipe is “Men Only” Lemon Drizzle, but I can attest that also women can make it with perfect results. Makes 16 squares Timings: 90 minutes
Pre heat your oven to 180°C, and grease and line a 22cm square baking tin. Beat the flour, baking powder, caster sugar, butter, eggs and lemon zest together into a fluffy batter. Spoon it into the tin and bake for 45-50 minutes until risen, golden brown and a skewer comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 10 minutes before turning it out. Mix the lemon juice and the granulated sugar in a small bowl, careful not to stir, you don’t want to dissolve the sugar. Prick the surface of the cake all over with a skewer and drizzle the juice/sugar over, letting it sink in. The cake will keep 5 days wrapped up in an airtight tin, if you don’t give it all away the day you make it. Breaded Lamb Chops with Roasted Fennel
Lamb is expensive and delicious, so make a small piece go a long way by coating a tender chop in a crisp breadcrumb. Local British grass-fed lamb is available from good butchers, and the grazing of animals on well maintained pasture or hillsides helps preserve our grassland species of plants and insects. This is a quick weeknight supper but also good enough for an Easter weekend meal, celebrating springtime and local food. The delicate flavour of lamb calls for a simple accompaniment, roast fennel and steamed green beans are perfect. But if you have big appetites to cater for, some buttery mashed potatoes would also go down very well indeed alongside the lamb and fennel. Serves 4 Timings: 45 minutes
Pre heat your oven to 200°C. Take off the outer leaves of the fennel and remove the stringy bits, slice up into pieces about 1 cm wide. Cut the rest of the fennel bulbs into similar size pieces. Put them all on a roasting tray and drizzle with olive oil, then massage the oil into the fennel with your hands. Season with salt and pepper and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, turning every now and then. The fennel will sweeten and brown as it bakes. Remove from the oven when the pieces are tender and a little browned at the edges. You can serve this room temperature so don’t bother to keep it warm unless you prefer. If you can resist eating the crispy bits straight from the pan you’ve got better willpower than I have. For the lamb: tidy the chops – depending on how your butcher has cut them. You don’t want large pieces of fat or chipped bone, so trim a bit if you need to. Lay the breadcrumbs and the egg in flat dishes in front of you and dip each chop first into the egg and then into the breadcrumbs, patting them on to make a nice firm coating. Lay the chops on a plate or tray for a few minutes to firm up and set. Fry the chops in about 1cm of oil in a large flat frying pan over a medium heat until the breadcrumb coating is crisp and browned and the lamb has reached how you like it – quite pink is very nice with these tender chops, and they only take about 3 minutes per side. Serve with simple green vegetables and your succulent roasted fennel. A squeeze of lemon juice over both the fennel and lamb will just give that final sparkle to the dish. |
Some Changes - April 2022
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