Hari Ghotra at Walter Rose

By: Mrs Robot

Chef Hari Ghotra was at our butcher, Walter Rose, last Saturday promoting her book Easy Indian. We had to go and get our weekly shop anyhow, so stopped and had a chat. She was really friendly, and the chicken dish she was cooking smelled amazing, though we didn't stick around long enough to try any of it as we thought it would be rude to monopolise her time.

We'll review the book properly once we've cooked a few things out of it. We're probably not the ideal readership as we don't actually own a slow cooker, which is what all the recipes are designed for, but I'm hoping some of the dishes will be the sort of thing we can leave in the oven on Low while we go to the gym. I also plan to try some of the recipes from Hari's website as they look really tempting.

Hari's also bringing out a range of spices-and-masala packets. We're big fans of Anjum Anand's 'Spice Tailor' range as an easy option when we're feeling lazy, and these look like doing the same job. They'll be in Morrison's, which we don't have, but if you shop at a Morrison's they'll be worth looking out for to keep as a cupboard standby.

Something fresh!

By: Mrs Robot

We're still around and still cooking - but as it's been three months since I last posted anything, I thought I'd better put something up. Anything.

It's been culinary sadtimes in the House of Robots, as our beloved butcher has closed its Trowbridge branch. We always thought it was a bit odd that a butcher as prestigious as Walter Rose had their second store in Trow, and over the past decade business in the town has slowed to the point where they're focussing on the restaurant trade. They're keeping their shop in Devizes, though, so we're taking a weekly drive over there now.

Leaving aside my sadness about what this means for my town - every time an essential shop closes, all the others lose a little more business - it is nice going to the Devizes branch, as business there is brisker so they have much more stock in the shop; among the things we got this week were smoked mutton and smoked chicken. There's also a fish counter at the Devizes branch (it had to be preordered in Trowbridge, which we were never organised enough to do) and it's been enjoyable having that as an option.

These prawns were absolute monsters, and we wanted to do them justice, so Mr Robot did them following Meera Sodha's tamarind and honey prawn recipe from her book Made In India. Served on vegetable cous cous with a cucumber and yoghurt raita, they were refreshing and delicious. We'll definitely be having them again!

A Mumbai feast

It's a while after new year, but I thought I'd write about our New Year's Day meal anyway. (Didn't want to do another post too soon after Mr Robot's last one, you might have run away in shock at two in a week.)

Mr Robot gave me a couple of cookbooks for Christmas: Mr Todiwala's Bombay, by Cyrus Todiwala, and Fortnum and Mason: The Cook Book. I don't know if I'd have picked up the Todiwala book myself, but it's really good. My go-to Indian recipe books tend to be by Anjum Anand and Meera Sodha. Meera Sodha is a particular favourite because her food has personality; you can really see how her family history and the ingredients around her in Britain have impacted on her cooking. Mr Todiwala's Bombay also has personality in spades. There's a real sense of place and of the mix of cultures that make up Mumbai as he shares the food that he loves: the street food that everyone eats, restaurant food, and the sort of thing families eat at home. I wanted to go to Mumbai anyhow as I love art deco and it's got some of the finest art deco buildings in the world, but now I want to go there for the food too!

I decided to make a proper dhansak (or dhaansaak as it's spelled in the book), as made by the Parsee community that Cyrus Todiwalla is part of.

Dhansaks are a curryhouse staple here in the UK, but this was very different from the oily stuff they serve up. You start by making the spicy lamb, which is then added to a pot of dal. I found the dal particularly unusual compared to ones I've made in the past as it contains fresh dill and plenty of sugar – I guess that shows the Persian roots of the Parsee people. The dal is supposed to be pureed smooth, and I did that this time but in future I might leave some of the lentils intact for a bit more texture and visual interest. There's a low ratio of lamb-to-dal. I was really worried about how all the flavours would turn out, as the mix was so unfamiliar to me, but it still tasted like 'a curry' to me, just with different herbal notes to what I'd usually expect. And that's one of the reasons I like making Indian food at home - bought ones always seem to lack the fresh flavour of the herbs.

A gorgeous brown caramelised onion pulao, seekh kebab balls (raising the amount of meat in the meal to a level carnivores will be happy with), and cachumbar make delicious accompaniments. I'd happily make all three of those to accompany other things. Every Indian chef I own a cookbook by has a recipe for cachumbar; Todiwalla's is heavier on the onion than the others that I've seen but it works really well with the sweet, lentil-heavy dhansak. And usually when a recipe 'serves four to six' there's really enough for two greedy robots plus a little leftover. Not here! Even by our standards this recipe easily serves six. I've put two meals' worth of dhansak, pulao and kebab balls in the freezer.

The Fortnum cookbook is an oddity. I must confess, while I know Tom Parker-Bowles is a food writer, I've never read any of his food writing, I only know him as 'that bloke whose mum is the future Princess Consort.' Mr Robot got it for me because I love the funny old shop, and the history of things, and this book contains little bits of Fort Noms' history. It's also stuffed with illustrations from the company catalogues of the 1930s and 1950s. I'm not sure how I feel about a lot of the recipes in the book as they're really very simple and I have similar elsewhere, though in their simplicity they do mean you need to use the very finest ingredients – replace butter with marge and it'll be all too obvious.

I made the raspberry trifle. I did vary things slightly, using cream rather than milk for the custard, and making a fresh raspberry compote rather than using jam. You're supposed to layer it jam, sponge with chambord, raspberries, custard, whipped cream, sponge with chambord, raspberries, custard, whipped cream, but I have a wide dish rather than a tall one so the layers came out a bit scanty. I left out the middle layer of cream and had a mere drizzle for the second layer of custard, so I think if I made it again I'd use far fewer sponges and only one layer of each ingredient. Still, it was jolly nice. Not over-fussy, just a tasty, creamy, fruity treat.

So, that was our New Year's Day meal. I hope yours was as good, and wish you all the best for the rest of 2017.

Book review: Made in India

By: Mrs Robot

I mentioned in a post last year that for me part of the reason I've tried to learn to cook Asian food is to connect with the unknown parts of my ancestry. For Christmas Mr Robot bought me a copy of Meera Sodha's book Made in India, because as her family came to Britain via Uganda, he thought I'd enjoy her stories of family movements and the Indian diaspora.

And he was right; I loved reading the stories of Sodha's relatives, and also seeing how the cuisine of Africa and later the raw ingredients available in England had an impact on their family recipes. Also, it puts an end to all Mr Robot's objections when I put something creative in a curry and he complains that it's not traditional. (Well, it should. I think he's always going to object to swede curry.)

Meera Sodha's daily dal, plus a lamb curry recipe by Anjum Anand

Since getting the book I've made plenty of recipes out of it. There's been Mum's Chicken Curry and Kachumbar, Daily Dal, and Pistachio and Yoghurt Chicken Curry plus Cinnamon and Clove Pilau with Cashew Nuts. At the start of the book Sodha has a joky bit 'Eat like an Indian, think like an Indian', which includes the advice "Feed the dog chapattis. Dogs love chapattis." I can confirm that Robocat does not like chapattis, but wouldn't stop scrounging tonight's tea, Wild Pheasant Curry, which I served with Sodha's cumin-roasted cauliflower and some pilau rice.

Fresh ginger and pistachios

The recipes that I've tried from the book result in dishes that are more aromatic than spicy. I don't know if that's because the recipes I've tried use a lot more nuts than the ones I've done from other Indian cookbooks. The pistachio curry was especially lovely, rich in ground cardamom. We put the leftovers of that into toasted sandwiches! I'm not sure if I cooked the onion long enough for that one - that's a skill I'm still trying to develop.

Pistachio and yoghurt chicken curry with pilau rice

I have also very much enjoyed the vegetable side dishes. I'm not sure exactly what makes them so much more appealing than the ones in other Indian cookbooks that we own, but we'll definitely be making the cauliflower again, and the kachumbar will be good to have over the summer. It'll go nicely with Mexican or Spanish dishes as well as Indian ones.

Wild pheasant curry, cumin-roasted cauliflower, pilau rice

All in all, there's only one thing I'd change about this book, and that's the cover, which I'd make a wipe-clean one! I suspect my copy is going to end up plastered in tomato all too quickly...

All photos copyright Mr Robot, and the presentation is mine - I have been told it needs work! Trust me, though, this all tasted absolutely delicious.

Food and roots (not vegetables!)

Mogok pork curry, MiMi Aye's recipe. 

By: Mrs Robot

This post comes about as the result of a drunken (on my part) conversation I had over Twitter with Kavey and MiMi Aye on Friday night on exploring other cuisines to connect with my roots. Twitter is not the best place to try to talk about anything meaningful, especially when you've had a few pints, and Kavey asked if I'd done a blog post on it. I hadn't, so here it is.

I am basically white English. By which I mean, an awful lot of my ancestry isn't English and some of it isn't even European. And to me, that is English; we're a nation mostly made up of mongrels, all with the restlessness and drive that comes from being descended from all sorts of people who decided get up off their backsides and make their lives better. But I have always had a curiosity about my granddad McDonald's family, partly because it was never really talked about. I knew he was born in Burma, and I remember him writing things in Burmese to show me, but that was pretty much that.

Most of my memories of Granddad Mac are of two things, war stories and food. I'll spare you the army pathologist tales, though I will say I was possibly the only eight-year old in East Anglia who knew how to remove a brain. On the food side, Granddad grew tomatoes, big fat beefsteak ones. He grew other vegetables when he was more agile, but in later life I can only remember him growing tomatoes. I, too, grow tomatoes every year. Outdoors on our patio they don't do well, but I do it anyway and they always make me think of him. Then he got ill, and talked more and more about Burma, and then he died.

After the funeral, there was a wake, with plenty of sweet sherry. I got talking to one of my great-aunts, and she reminisced about their childhood in Burma, in a little town called Maymyo - now Pyin Oo Lwin. (Mr Robot and I visited there last year, the first members of my family to do so in decades.) And things rolled round to food. My great-aunt spoke of how they'd have mangoes for pudding. The fruit would be in a bucket of cold water, and no-one could take one until they'd finished their main course. All the children would race to finish so they could have first pick of the mangoes, and they'd always pick the largest one and it would always be woody. Granddad, being a slow eater, would inevitably get a small but juicy one. My great-aunt also spoke with regret of not being able to get fresh tamarind in this country. I thought to myself, "What did granddad miss?" He spent half a century living a completely British life. Did he eat many mangoes in later life? What on earth did he think of British curries, made with curry powder and raisins?!

My great-grandmother in Maymyo

I've done digging around in the family tree, and I'm pretty sure we're part Burmese on my grandfather's father's side - often, with Eurasian family history, you are working with three things: information, no information, and a significantly-shaped absence of information. It's working out whether you know nothing or whether you know the nothing means something that's the tricky bit! My grandfather's mother was Anglo-Indian, from Calcutta. She must have grown up with that community's unique cuisine, which over decades blended European and Indian favourites to come up with something all of its own, but I know nothing of it.

And so I developed an interest in Asian food, partly as a way of connecting to these people and places in the absence of names and faces and stories. I can't reach out to them in person, and few physical things remain, so sharing food is my only way to make a connection.  I still know very little about Burmese or Indian food, and to be honest it's taught me nothing concrete about Granddad or the nameless Asian ladies in my family tree, any connection is purely an emotional one, and only in my mind. If I wanted to connect with family through food in a tangible way, I'd do better to eat some de Solminihac oysters, as they would at least be farmed by a distant relative. (The connection there is via India - my Anglo-Indian great-grandmother was a de Solminihac.) But I have enjoyed some very tasty meals, and visited some wonderful places, and met some kind and knowledgeable people, online and off, so I will continue to explore Burmese and Indian cuisine.

And I still wish I could ask Granddad what he thought of British curries!

Recipe Review: Biryani a la Mamta

By: Mr Robot

Dunno about you but I love Biryani. There's a certain mindset that says it's too simple or you're somehow inauthentic for ordering it (as opposed to the hottestly inedible thing you can find guv, with extra nasty). Personally I reckon  it's one of those dishes that shows the true quality of Chef.

So when I stumbled across Kavey's Mamta's recipe for Biryani - and read it closely - I was massively excited. It's pretty simple but quite involved, which if I'm honest, is exactly what I want from a favourite; I set aside a whole Sunday with roughly 3 hours cooking pencilled in.

We start, sez Kavey, with frying onions for at least half an hour. Now happily I habla a bit so that fazes me not and, believe me, it's not a step to skimp on.

With onions cooked to approximately Van Food darkness, and scooped out of pan, we sling in lambkin, whole spices, garlic, ginger & chilli, and brown until happy. Then goes in more chilli goodness with yoghurt & herbs, and simmer to proper curry. You may be tempted to try it at this point, and I'd urge you to do so. Pokey? You're doing it right then.

MEAT AND STUFF

That's going to simmer for a while, and get mellow. In the meantime you're going to cook rice - with herbs - badly. As in, all those times you're too impatient and you end up with rice that looks properly fluffy but has a horrible crunch inside? That.

Believe it or not, we're basically there.

For lack of a better word, Golly

Oil up a BIG dish and layer rice, saffron juice, rose water, those onions, and the curry a couple'a times and you're away. Oven hottish, Half an hour. The rice will finish cooking without getting gluey; the flavours will spread unevenly; almonds top it for crunch (and almond, of course).

Get your bib on because you WILL dribble.

Go on - pretend you're not dribbling

Realistically? I think I got the 3hrs thing from Kavey but I was pretty well sorted in an hour and a half before the oven - however as she says much of that will depend on the quality of your meat. Obviously I have quiveringly good meat...

More honestly I did spend most of a Sunday on this, but it was so worth it. The Biryani is a recipe done in stages and between those steps I made both Tinga de Pollo and a Shin o' Beef stew for later in the week. So in my world, time to cook is about 3 hrs but actual work-time is maybe 1.5 hrs.

Rose water is sprinkled over the rice. Being a bit wanky, I also sprinkled rose petals

The result is, beyond doubt, delicious. To me the value of making this at home was the whole spices kicking small explosions: chilli BOOM and a cardamom tickle and then some saffron snuggle before a CURRY PUNCH, and that amazingly sweet nuggety (or perhaps nougaty) onion running throughout.

Kavey reckons it'll serve 4 and I believe that to be true. Luckily there were only two of us...

One of the best things you'll ever eat

We are not in the business of giving away other folks' recipes. If they're in books, we'll say buy it. In this case, it's available online so get it from the source.

All images (c) PP Gettins