To briskly continue my regular series of cooking blog posts (previous post March 1st 2005) I present the vegetable dopiaza. I made one last night and it was yum, though I do admit to having been overly generous with all the spices – which I like but Louisa doesn’t.
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Vegetable Dopiaza Recipe
January 31st, 2008Tags: cooking, curry, dopiaza, eating, food, recipe, spices, vegetarian -
NCFE exam
March 22nd, 2005Tags: exam, ncfe, sindhi kormaIt’s my NCFE Asian cookery exam tonight. We’ve got to make a Sindhi Korma, and some other stuff. I’m looking forward to passing. Let’s hope I do.
update: Both myself and Louisa passed the practical and written exam. I won’t belittle my achievement but I will say this: whilst I’m very confident at cooking various Asian curries and breads now, I won’t be winning any positions in the kitchens at Aagrah’s or Akbar’s.
I still plan to write up the missing recipies, and anything new I try.
Follow your dreams. You can meet your goals. I am living proof.
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Indian cookery episode 7, George Lucas sucks
March 1st, 2005Tags: chicken, cooking, curry, jalfrezi, nan, recipe, seekh kebabThe course was billed as Indian cookery but the guy teaching us isn’t Indian, he’s Pakistani (well he’s British, but you know what I mean). The food we cook isn’t either Indian or Pakistani really, it’s like a honkey bastardized asian cuisine (Wasim put it a lot more delicately than that when explaining to me :)
Anyway, I’m well behind in my write-ups. This week we made Seekh kebab, Nan and Chicken Jalfrezi. Ingredients and method follow:
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Indian cookery episode 4 – Onion hope
February 1st, 2005Tags: cooking, ghee, gosht, lamb, recipeThis week Gosht (Lamb) Achar and Lemon Rice. Pretty easy and all went without major explosions or poisoning. The aluminium pans we’re using worry me, though I forget why.
I’ve included the recipes this week, and plan to go back and add the previous ones in too.
By the way, ghee is clarified butter. It doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge and keeps for a long time (so long as you keep it in an airtight container). It has a very high smoke point and doesn’t discolour or burn when heated up to it. It has a distinct flavour, quite different to butter.
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Indian cookery episode 2 – Attack of the cloves
January 19th, 2005Tags: bhaji, cooking, curry, korma, pakoraThis week we made vegetable pakora, sindhi korma and aloo bhaji. It actually all went pretty well. I didn’t burn anything, I didn’t forget any ingredients (that I noticed), and nobody died by my hand. This might have been something to do with working directly across from Louisa this time; being able to exploit her cookery skills. The food tasted good enought to eat two days in a row too.
I think there is a kind of rhythm to cooking; a beat to which ingredients must be added, flames are adjusted and mixing occurrs. Last week I was seriously out of time. This week I felt I was almost getting it. Imagine that it’s some groovy off-beat syncopated beat and I’m only managing to keep up a simple 4/4 with it.
I didn’t have time to deep fry my pakora, which I was kind of relieved about as the deep fryer scared me to death.
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Indian cookery episode 1 – The kitchen menace
January 13th, 2005Tags: aagrah, balti, chicken, Cookery, lassi, meat, ncfe, pilau riceI attended the first lesson of an NCFE in Indian cookery last night. My culinary skills are a little rusty. For example, I had trouble remembering how best to slice a tomato. This is probably because I’ve never sliced a tomato in my life.
Meat. That’s a new one too. I don’t even eat meat. I learned that Chicken flesh is actually *flesh*. Pink and bloody. That’s certainly more than 6 degrees separation from your McNugget.
John Leach is a human being living in Leeds, UK.