Making A Real Curry Meal
It’s been just less than a year since I began trying the recipes on the Curry Focus website.
In the first few weeks, I followed the recipes extremely carefully and was sometimes unsure as to what would actually be served at dinner time.
In the early weeks I was probably testing myself as much as testing the recipes and couldn’t adapt if I made a mistake when cooking.
And I also could not tell that some recipes were wrong or not quite correct.
A year forward still sees me carefully following the recipes because I need to ensure that the recipes on the website actually work.
But I’m a more adaptable now and can improvise as I’m cooking.
If a recipe doesn’t work then I can often work out why and then try it again once I’ve changed the ingredients or adjusted the cooking times.
But during these months I have only cooked one dish at a time (I won’t pretend that rice is a dish). I cooked a chicken, pork, beef, lamb or vegetarian curry.
But last weekend I made a meal instead of a single dish.
I picked the saag gosht as the main because it simmers for 90 minutes for the last cooking stage and gave me enough time to make the other dishes.
Before starting the saag gosht, I mixed up the dough for some naan and left it to rise.
Then I made a batch of mango lassi and put it in the fridge to cool.
Whilst the naan dough was rising, and the mango lassi was chilling, I got ready the ingredients for the saag gosht and then relaxed and read the paper for a couple of hours.
After a good read, I started to cook the saag gosht.
Once the saag soght had started to simmer, I rolled out the naan bread and baked the bread. I had already preheated the lower oven and put the ready naans into the oven to keep them warm. I baked all of the naans although I only needed 4 for dinner and put the surplus naans aside to cool – once the naans had cooled I put them into individual plastic bags and then put them into the freezer for another day.
I infused some saffron threads in hot water by putting 10 saffron threads into an egg cup, pouring in some boiling water and leaving them for 10 minutes.
Then I made the Aloo Gobi (cauliflower and potato) as a side dish.
Now it was time to cook the rice so I put it into the microwave after having mixed the infused saffron with the rice and water.
And everything was ready at the scheduled dinner time.
We had saag gosht on saffron rice, with a side of aloo gobi, naan bread and a delicious mango lassi.
It was a wonderful meal.
Everything worked well and there were no problems during the cooking.
So I’ve come a long way in a year but I’m not complacent. I’ve still got a lot to learn before I can really call myself a cook. But it has been fun getting to this stage and most of the food has been very yummy.
