Bhindi bahji with whole spices

Bhindi bahji
Bhindi bahji

I’ve got collection of bad habits which do nothing to endear me to my local Indian takeaway. If we’re having takeout, I usually cook our own rice, occasionally heat up some oil for DIY poppadoms, and then fail miserably to order anything other than vegetable dishes, which happen to be the least expensive thing on the menu.  This doesn’t all come from being a hideous cheapskate; it’s just that I like my own pilau rice better than the stuff with the red and green food colouring in it, and have had a preference for vegetable curries ever since I got food poisoning in India in 2005. (A tip: if you’re in a city where the sewers drain directly into the sea, don’t eat the prawns.) And poppadoms are great fun to make at home, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried.

Sadly for the local takeaway, I’ve started to take to making bhindi bahji, which is probably my all-time favourite curryhouse dish, at home too. There are a few reasons for creating this extra work for myself: home-made bhindi bahji is a lot less greasy than the restaurant kind, which always comes drowning in ghee for no reason that I can really make out, and I can control the cooking of the okra to make sure it doesn’t produce any of the snotty slime that puts so many people off the vegetable.

I love okra. I like its texture (I even like slippery, slimy okra, especially for its ability to thicken the base it’s cooked in), its flavour and the shuddery feeling I got aged about ten when my parents used to refer to it as “ladies’ fingers”. It’s a much maligned vegetable, and I’d encourage you to have a go at making this dish if the only okra you have experienced is olive green and exuding stuff that looks as if it came out of a snail. Cooked like this, it is crisp, fresh- tasting and entirely snot-free.

To serve two as one of two curries on the table, you’ll need:

150g fresh okra
12 fresh, sweet cherry tomatoes
1 medium red onion
2 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1½ teaspoons turmeric powder
1 tablespoon ghee or groundnut oil

Chop the okra into pieces about an inch long (larger pieces mean less potential for slime) and dunk in a large bowl of water with a couple of spoons of salt dissolved in it. Drain in a colander. Halve the tomatoes and set aside, and chop the garlic.

Cut the onion in half, and slice it into half moons. Heat the ghee or groundnut oil to a high temperature in a frying pan or wok, and throw the onion in. Stir fry it for three minutes, then add all the spices and the garlic to the pan. Continue to stir fry until the onion is turning translucent (a couple of minutes) and the spices are giving off their fragrance.

Add the drained okra to the pan and keep stir-frying for one minute. Add the tomatoes, and continue to cook, stirring all the time, until the tomatoes start to collapse in on themselves and the okra is a bright green and piping hot. Taste for seasoning, and add some salt if necessary.

Serve immediately.

Singapore noodles with miso chicken

Singapore noodles with miso chickenSingapore noodles are another dish with a misleading name. They don’t appear at all in Singapore, despite their ubiquity on Hong Kong, UK, US and other Chinese restaurant menus. It’s unclear where the recipe originates, but it’s now a take-away standard. I suppose it makes sense; Singaporean and Malaysian food is characterised as being a bold, mish-mash of cultures, and this dish fits that description well.

Given that noodles in this style are something of a made-up dish, I allowed myself some latitude when I couldn’t find all the ingredients I wanted to use. You’ll see beansprouts in the ingredient list below, and they do make for a much more interesting mouthful, so include them if you can. There appears to be a beansprout drought in these parts at the moment, so you won’t see any in the photo. I’ve used a wheat/egg ramen noodle rather than the traditional rice vermicelli you often find in restaurants; this isn’t such an odd choice, and you’ll find many UK Chinese restaurants using a wheat noodle, but some do prefer vermicelli, so substitute them if you’re a particular fan. As always with curry powder, find the best you can. There’s a world of difference between those jars from Sharwood’s and Bart’s and a good curry powder from a small producer. Malaysian curry powder is preferable here, if you can find it, for its complex and herbaceous aromatics.

The chicken, sweet and intensely umami, is a lovely foil to the noodles. Marinate it overnight if possible. The marinade, boiled through thoroughly, makes a fine dipping sauce to go alongside this meal, or can be spooned over in small quantities. The sauce is packed with flavour, so you won’t need much. You can, of course, cook the chicken separately from the noodles; it’s fantastic cold and makes a very good sandwich filling or, diced, a Chinese salad addition.

To serve two, you’ll need:

Noodles
200g thin ramen or rice vermicelli
6 spring onions
1 medium red onion
1 red pepper
1 carrot
75g beansprouts
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons of  your favourite curry powder
30ml rice wine
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
Small amount of oil to stir fry

Chicken
2 skinless, boneless breasts
2 tablespoons white miso
2 tablespoons rice wine
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Marinate the chicken overnight in all the chicken ingredients (or for at least six hours). Remove from the marinade and grill under a medium flame for 8-10 minutes per side until done while you cook the noodles. Put the remaining marinade in a little pan and bring it to a rolling boil for a couple of minutes, then put to one side until you are ready to serve.

Chop the spring onions into coins, chop the garlic, slice the onion, dice the pepper and cut the carrot into thin diagonal slivers. Prepare the noodles for stir-frying by following the instructions on the packet. In your wok, take a little groundnut or grapeseed oil, and fry the spring onions, garlic, onion and pepper with the curry powder over a very high heat, moving everything around all the time, until the onion takes on a little char at the edges (only a few minutes). Add the noodles, carrots and beansprouts to the wok. Stir-fry until everything is well mixed, then add the liquid ingredients. Stir through again, turn the heat down and put a lid on the pan for 2 minutes before serving.

Dish the noodles out and slice the chicken breasts on the diagonal before placing them on top of the noodles with a little of the cooked marinade. Serve immediately.

Malaysian fried chicken – inche kabin

Inche kabinI’m on a bit of a Malaysian kick at the moment. I’ve not been back in six years, and it’s getting to me. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to head for Rasa Sayang in London’s Chinatown, where, if you half-close your eyes and relax, you can imagine you’re eating in Kuala Lumpur. (In one of the clean bits.) Failing that, you can get out your wok.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 jointed chicken OR 200g chicken wings
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons coconut milk (this is an occasion on which the brands with emulsifier work best)
2 heaped tablespoons curry powder
2 inches ginger, grated and squeezed for the juice
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
50g rice flour
Oil for deep frying – I used grape seed oil, which has a very high smoke point and a neutral flavour

Try to find a Malaysian curry powder like Linghams which is meant for chicken – they have a very specific and delicious flavour. Failing that, Bolst’s Madras curry powder is always an excellent fallback.

Marinate the jointed chicken or wings in the sugar, coconut, curry powder, ginger juice and soy overnight in the fridge. If you were in Malaysia, you’d take the chicken outside at this point and lay it in the blistering hot sun for half an hour or so, until the marinade had dried onto the meat, and then fry. Fat chance of that in Cambridgeshire.  So I use a tip I picked up from one of my cousins, and dredge the wet, marinaded meat with rice flour. Rice flour gives this dish a fantastic crunch, and also retains that crunch when the chicken is cold, making this a brilliant selection for a picnic.

Heat enough oil in your wok to half-submerge the pieces of chicken (or use your deep fryer), and bring to a frying temperature (about 180°C/360°f). Fry the chicken, turning regularly, for about 12 minutes, until cooked through and tender.

Serve immediately, or cool and eat as part of a cold supper or picnic. Worcestershire sauce is a common accompaniment for this, but I much prefer a bowl of soy sauce with some green bird’s eye chilli snipped into it to dip the chicken pieces into.

South-East Asian salmon curry

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you’ll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the “what’s in the fridge” nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I’d bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet’s a pest to cook with if you’re not doing something very simple with it – too much moving around and it’ll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don’t bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

Dry prawn curry

I’m back from a couple of weeks mixing business with pleasure in Florida. More on what we ate later on – for now, here’s a recipe using a curry paste that sprang, fully formed, into my head while we were away.

I went out to Mill Road in Cambridge as soon as we got back to buy some lovely big prawns, still in their shells, at Sea Tree, a new-ish fish restaurant with the city’s only non-supermarket wet fish counter on the far side of the railway bridge; and some fresh spice ingredients at Cho Mee, my favourite of the oriental supermarkets on the town side. It made the whole kitchen smell of South East Asia. Serve the prawns with some fried rice (mine was based around three diced lap cheong, or Chinese sausages, fried until crisp, with spring onions, chopped snake beans, sesame oil and soy, then proteined up with a couple of eggs) or some plain rice and a flavourful stir-fried vegetable.

To serve two handsomely, you’ll need:

12 king or tiger prawns, shells and heads on
2 fingers fresh turmeric root (see below)
1 inch piece ginger
1 large shallot
3 large red chillies
5 fat cloves garlic
2 sticks lemongrass
30g coriander root
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
8 whole cloves
4 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 tablespoons soy sauce

You might not be familiar with fresh turmeric – it usually comes pre-dried and ground in little pots, by which point it has lost the greater part of its slightly bitter, prickly flavour and intense aroma. The picture here should help you identify it if you’re in a shop that stocks ingredients like this (an Indian or oriental supermarket should be able to help you out). Those roots are about the size of your little finger. Be aware that the yellow of the turmeric stains just as badly, if not worse, than the dried stuff does – this is curcumin, an antioxidant that is supposed to be wildly good for you. It’s also wildly yellow. So get ready for daffodil fingernails – they’ll scrub clean eventually, but it’ll take some work. I’ve also used the very aromatic roots of coriander from the same shop, which usually come attached to the leafy herb and are very inexpensive.

Use a sharp knife to peel the turmeric and ginger. Remove the skins from the shallot and garlic and chop the lemongrass into chunks. Put the lot in the bowl of a food processor with the dry spices, the chillies, the soy sauce (I used Kikkoman) and some flavourless oil. Whizz until you have a nearly smooth paste.

Remove half of the paste to a container, cover with more oil and pop in the fridge to use later on. It’s worth always making too much curry paste – it hangs around for a week or so very nicely in the fridge, you can use it in plenty of different recipes, and it’s infinitely less faff than making it as you need it. Put the prawns in a large dish and cover with the remaining half of the curry paste. Set aside to marinade for 45 minutes to an hour.

When you are ready to cook the prawns, heat some more vegetable oil (about half a centimetre’s depth) in a large frying pan to a high temperature. Add the prawns – carefully, they’ll sizzle – to the oil with what marinade sticks to them and fry without moving them around the pan until the top side, not in the oil, has turned pink. Add whatever curry paste remains in the marinade dish to the pan and turn the prawns over. The shells on the side which has been in contact with the oil should have opaque patches alongside the translucent pink. Continue to cook until the other side of the prawns has opaque skins and the curry paste is brown and sticky. Serve immediately – and if you’re bold, you’ll eat the shells and suck the good stuff out of the heads.

Bombay new potatoes

Here’s the recipe I promised last week to use up the other half of that curry paste. I particularly like new potatoes in this sort of dry curry; their waxy texture and delicate flavour works very well against the aromatic spicing, and leaving the skins on helps them finish with a nice crisp.

600g new potatoes
Half of Friday’s curry paste
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Flavourless oil or ghee to fry
Salt
Fresh coriander to garnish

If you didn’t cook the peas keema, Friday’s curry paste was made with 1 peeled bulb of garlic, 10 spring onions, 1 fat piece of ginger, about 5cm long and 4 green chillies. I used half of it for the peas keema and the other half for this recipe, which makes a fantastic accompaniment for the lamb and peas. If you’re only cooking one of the recipes, either make up a whole batch of curry paste and freeze half, or just halve the amounts.

A few hours before you cook the meal, steam the new potatoes for 25 minutes, drain and leave in the saucepan to cool completely. When cold, chop them in half (or quarters, if yours are large).

When you are ready to start cooking, stir the turmeric into the curry paste. Bring a couple of tablespoons of oil or ghee to temperature in a large, non-stick saucepan over a medium flame, and sauté the whole fennel seeds in the hot oil for a few seconds. Add the curry paste (now bright yellow) and fry, stirring all the time, for a couple of minutes. Tip in the potatoes with a large pinch of salt and keep frying, stirring every now and then, for about 10 minutes until the potatoes are crusty and golden. Serve immediately. These potatoes are also extremely good cold.

Peas keema – keema mattar

Since I made that rice pudding, Indian food, and especially the Indian food I used to eat at friends’ houses when I was a kid, has been much on my mind. Here in the UK, the cuisine of India has embedded itself into the national consciousness – the Victorians were currying things from their new empire with glee, thrilled to discover a way to disguise the flavour of last week’s mutton; surveys done nowadays have demonstrated that the nation’s favourite dish is a Chicken Tikka Masala (something you’d never find in India – it’s a dish that’s evolved over here all on its own); my parents’ fridge was never innocent of at least one jar of Sharwood’s or Patak’s chutney in the 80s. I remember with great pleasure visits to my schoolfriend Gayatri’s house, where her Mum, an outstandingly good home cook, would make us saucepans full of sweet, milky masala tea, sneak us sticky, sugary halva while we played in the garden, and serve up about five different curries with rice when it came to mealtime, all different and all wonderful.

Peas keema was a regular feature on the lunch table. It’s delicious – make plenty, because it freezes very successfully. I’ve made a curry paste which serves (with the addition of different spices) as the base for both this and the Bombay potato recipe I’ll post on Monday, so hold out until then before you make this, or reduce the ingredients of the wet paste by half if you plan on cooking it over the weekend.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 bulb garlic, peeled
10 spring onions
1 fat piece of ginger, about 5cm long
4 green chillies (I used Thai bird’s eye chillies – adjust amount and variety according to your taste – this amount is pretty spicy)
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
750g minced lamb
300g frozen petits pois
300ml stock
2 teaspoons garam masala
1 large handful fresh coriander (about 20g, if you’re measuring)
Salt
Juice of 1-2 lemons
Flavourless oil or ghee to fry

Begin by reducing the white parts of the spring onions (reserving the green), the ginger, the chillies and the garlic to a paste in the food processor. Reserve half of this mixture to form the base for the Bombay potatoes, which go very well with this dish.

Crush the cumin and coriander finely with a mortar and pestle, and stir them into the half of the paste you are using for this recipe with a generous pinch (use all the fingers of one hand for this) of salt.

Heat some oil over a medium flame and fry the paste for a couple of minutes until it is giving up its fragrance. I like to use a wok with a lid or a large Le Creuset casserole dish for this dish, which allows you plenty of room to work in. Add the minced lamb and fry, stirring continuously, until it is browned evenly (about 5 minutes). Add the stock, turn the heat down to a very low simmer, and put a lid on. Leave to simmer for 30 minutes while you chop the green parts of the onions into pea-sized pieces and mince the coriander.

At the end of the 30 minutes, taste for salt and add more if you need it (you probably will – this dish can take quite a lot of salt). Stir in the garam masala, the peas and the chopped green parts of the spring onion. Continue to simmer for a moment until the peas are no longer frozen, and add the juice of one lemon. Taste again – you may prefer more lemon juice (I like mine very sharp and usually use the juice of two lemons). Cover and cook for another 10 minutes until the peas are soft. They turn a slightly unfortunate colour with all this cooking, but they taste fabulous.

Take the pan off the heat skim off any fat. Stir in the chopped coriander and serve immediately.

Chicken devil curry

This is a recipe with a really interesting pedigree. It’s a Malaysian curry, but it’s not a Tamil Indian, Malay or Chinese recipe. This dish is unique to the Kristang, descendants of Portuguese traders who lived in the port of Malacca, and is deliciously different in flavour to the curries you usually find in Malaysia.

Chicken devil curry is a bit like a cross between the vinegar-seasoned curries of Goa and the devilled foods of Victorian Britain. It’s fiery hot, and unbelievably tasty. Serve with plenty of rice – you’ll need it to soak up the sauce, which is serious foretaste-of-the-heavenly-feast stuff, and to temper the heat of the chillies. I served this with some dal and some cooling pineapple and cucumber salad.

To serve 4, you’ll need:

6 chicken joints (your choice), with bone and skin
4 medium potatoes
1 large onion
6 cloves garlic
2 in piece of ginger, peeled
1 stalk lemongrass
10 fresh red chillies
10 dried red chillies
10 blanched almonds (or 5 candlenuts, if you can find them)
2 teaspoons powdered mustard
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 can coconut milk (use a brand like Chacao without emulsifiers)
1 teaspoon caster sugar
Salt and pepper

Rub the chicken pieces (I used six thighs) with a teaspoon of caster sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a generous amount of pepper. Set aside while you prepare the curry paste.

Put the onion, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, almonds and both kinds of chillies in the bowl of your food processor with 2 tablespoons of water, and whizz until everything is reduced to a paste.

Heat 2 tablespoons of flavourless oil in a wok, and brown the chicken all over. Remove it to a plate, and add the curry paste to the hot wok. Cook the paste over a high flame, stirring all the time, for five minutes with a spoonful of the cream from the top of the coconut milk.

Add the mustards, the sugar and vinegar to the paste and stir until the mixture starts to bubble. Lower the heat to medium and slide the browned chicken pieces into the pan to cook in the paste for ten minutes. Add the rest of the coconut milk from the can with a teaspoon of salt and the chopped potatoes. Stir well to make sure all the potato and chicken is covered with sauce, put a lid on the wok and simmer over a low flame for 20-30 minutes.

Dal

I decided on a bit of childhood nostalgia for supper over the weekend. When I was a very little girl and we went to visit family in Malaysia, the biggest treat in the world was a trip with my Grandfather in his Mini Moke, starting before dawn, to inspect the rubber and palm oil plantations. It was magical – the stink of curing rubber, a thrilling terror of snakes in the dark, the burst jackfruit on the plantation floor, and the two of us bumping along jungly roots and mud in what looked for all the world like a set of tent poles in a wheeled orange dinghy.

At the end of his tour of inspection, my Grandfather habitually stopped for breakfast at an Indian coffee shop, and for me, this was the perfect end to an almost unbearably exciting morning. What we ordered was always perfectly simple: two bowls of rice, two roti canai, and a positive lake of delicious dal.

Proust had his Madelines. I have lentils. When I spooned this over my rice at the weekend, I felt as if I was seven again. Eating stuff like this is a fabulous way to keep young. To serve 4-5 people as one of two curries on the table, you’ll need:

250g mung dal (mung lentils, available at Indian supermarkets)
1 large onion
4 cloves garlic
1 piece of ginger, about the length of your thumb
4 cloves
2 cardamom pods
1 star anise
3 dried chillies (I used Malaysian cili padi)
1 teaspoon curry powder (I used Bolst’s)
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 or 2 Thai bird’s eye chillies
Water
Salt
2 tablespoons ghee

Start by picking through the lentils for any twigs or stones. Rinse the lentils well in a sieve and soak in cold water while you prepare the base of the curry (about fifteen minutes).

Slice the onion finely and chop the garlic. Wallop the ginger with the side of a cleaver or something heavy, and chop into slices. In a saucepan, fry the onion, garlic, ginger, cloves, cardamom, anise and dried chillies in the ghee until the onion is browning. Add the turmeric and curry powder, and continue to cook for a couple of minutes. Add the drained lentils to the pan with the chopped bird’s eye chillies, and pour over water to cover the lentils by about 3cm. Stir in about a teaspoon of salt.

Simmer the dal gently for between 30 and 45 minutes, until the lentils are soft. Add more water if you prefer a thinner, more sauce-like dal. Serve as one of a selection of curries.

Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I like to make a vegetable curry as an accompaniment when I make a meat one, but this curry is substantial and tasty enough to stand up as a meal on its own with rice. This curry is in a southern Indian style, with coconut milk making the curry rich and thick, and lime juice adding zing. It’s great for vegetarians – it’s loaded with flavour, and will have the meat-eaters fighting among themselves (probably with forks) for a helping too.

I have been lazy in this recipe and haven’t made my own curry paste. A good shop-bought curry powder works very well here – as usual, I recommend Bolst’s Madras powder, which is really well-balanced and fragrant. To serve four, you’ll need:

3 sweet potatoes
2 onions
6 spring onions plus more to garnish
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 inch piece of ginger
4 cloves garlic
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk
1 bird’s eye chilli (more if you want a hotter curry)
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons oil
Salt to taste

Dice the onions and slice the spring onions, and sauté them in the oil with the curry powder and the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger, both chopped finely, with the diced and peeled sweet potato and the sliced chilli, and continue to sauté until the sweet potato starts to caramelise and brown a little at the edges.

Pour the coconut milk over the curry, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sweet potato is soft. Add the drained chickpeas to the pan with half the lime juice and a teaspoon of salt, and simmer for another five minutes. Taste for seasoning – you may want to add more lime. Remove from the heat and stir in the fresh coriander, and garnish with some sliced spring onion.

This curry tastes even better if you leave it in the fridge for a day before reheating and serving. If you do this, add some more fresh coriander when you serve it.