Green Romanesco Cauliflower Cheese

A few months back, sitting on Mathilde's comfy sofa and chatting vegetables to Carla, I bemoaned my lack of adventurousness, inventiveness and originality when it comes to cooking vegetables at home. Carla had some tasty ideas (and recommended Yotam Ottolenghi's books, which I really ought to get my hands on). Mathilde rushed out of the room and returned with a gift for me, The Farm Shop Cookbook by Christine McFadden.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when (almost 6 months late and only then because I chased and chased and chased) I finally received a box of Riverford vegetables and their book; this was the gift offered with a subscription to Food & Travel magazine.

In the box was a beautiful Romanesco cauliflower (also known as Romanesco broccoli) with it's vivid lime green hue and compelling naturally fractal spiral heads.

What to do with it?

I know I could have checked in the Riverford book but went instead to Mathilde's gift.

The Farm Shop Cookbook revealed a recipe for Green Cauliflower Cheese with Blue Vinny and Tomatoes. We decided to subsitute Stilton for the Blue Vinny and omitted the tomatoes and breadcrumbs.

Green Romanesco Cauliflower Cheese with Stilton and Parmesan

Ingredients:
1 Romanesco cauliflower (ours was approximately 500 grams)
30 grams butter
2 tablespoons plain flour
300 ml milk
1/4 teaspoon English mustard
salt and pepper to taste
Approximately 100 grams Stilton (might have been more, we didn't measure)
"Some" grated Parmesan cheese

Method:

• Cut the Romanesco into pieces, discarding the tough stalks.

• Microwave (or steam, as per the original instructions) until only just tender and set aside.
• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
• Melt the butter over low heat.
• Sprinkle in the flour and cook, stirring, for about 2 minutes until very smooth.
• Heat the milk in a separate pan until it starts to bubble, then gradually whisk it into the flour mixture.
• Remove from the heat and stir in the mustard, seasoning and Stilton.

• Stir until the cheese has melted completely into the sauce.
• Pour / mix the sauce with the Romanesco.

• Grate parmesan over the top.
• Bake for 20 minutes until golden and bubbling.

We had this with a lovely roast rib of beef and some roast potatoes (also from the box).

Absolutely delicious and we'll definitely be making green cauliflower cheese again!

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Hix' Baked Parsnips with Lancashire Cheese

Why are we eating parsnips in the summer?

Well... we grow our own vegetables and, last year, we planted parsnips for the first time.

Early January was rainy and miserable and we left much of our winter crop in the ground for longer than we should have. So we urgently harvested a bumper crop of giant parsnips in January, just before leaving for a month in the Falklands. We froze several boxes, prepped and chopped into batons, and promptly forgot about them until a recent push to work through our freezer stock.

A couple of months ago, I was sent a review copy of Hix Oyster & Chop House. Things were a bit busy at the time and I browsed through the book, bookmarked a handful of recipes that appealed and put it to one side.

And there it stayed, on my mental list of things to get around to, until we were suddenly looking for parsnip recipes at the height of summer!

As fans of gratin dauphinois – thinly sliced and layered potatoes and cream baked in the oven, sometimes with the addition of milk, cream and garlic – it's not hard to understand the appeal of parsnips baked with cream and cheese!

Baked Parsnips with Lancashire Cheese

You can see the original ingredients, quantities and instructions here:

Our adjusted quantities (serves 4)
500 grams parsnips
150 ml double cream
200 ml milk
a pinch of grated nutmeg
2 garlic cloves
salt and freshly ground black pepper
100-150 grams Lancashire cheese

Note: we omitted the fresh white breadcrumbs

Our adjusted method

• Preheat oven to 160 degrees C.
• Cut the parsnips into rough 2-3 cm chunks.

• Pour the cream and milk into a saucepan, add the nutmeg and garlic, and season generously with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then turn off the heat and leave to cool slightly.
• Put the parsnips into a shallow ovenproof (gratin-type) dish and mix with the cheese.
• Pour the cream mixture over the top.

I love that this photo includes Pete's foot!

• Cook in the oven for an hour until the parsnips are cooked through.

The tang of the cheese against the sweetness of the parsnips is magical and the cream and milk make it wonderfully rich. This is definitely one of those dishes that's more than the sum of its parts, though its parts are all very good already.

For this one recipe alone, I'm hugely grateful to Mark Hix and his book and have gone back to the book to search out other gems I may have looked over in my initial bookmarking.

The book is Hix' first restaurant book, though his previous titles about fish and British food have been well received. Named after his first restaurant, Hix Oyster & Chop House, in London's Smithfield market, the book features recipes that appear on the menu throughout the year.

As the name of the book suggests, the two main foci are oysters and meat, although, as my chosen recipe indicates, there are also recipes for starters, sides, desserts and even cocktails.

Oyster fans will likely appreciate the chapter introducing 8 types of Oysters (all from the UK and Ireland, both native and cultivated types) along with and instructions on how to shuck them.

The Meat chapter covers beef, veal, lamb and venison, providing information (and great photographs) on different cuts and how best to cook them. Of course, it's not nearly as comprehensive as the information in Leith's Meat Bible, that I reviewed recently, but then I wouldn't expect it to be.

Oddly enough, although I'd happily order many of the mains if I were visiting the restaurant, there are not that many that appeal to cook at home. But there are some recipes I want to try in the other chapters, including cobb egg (like scotch eggs but with a fish mixture around the eggs, rather than pork), Heaven and Earth (based on the German himmel und erder), several of the salad dressings, coley with sea spinach and brown shrimps, chop house butter, shipwreck tart (which I tasted when we visited Hix Oyster and Fish House), white port and strawberry trifle, and hix oyster ale cake.

It's an attractive book, I can't help but like the simple brown paper cover and clean design. If the other recipes we try are as successful as the parnsip bake, it'll earn a place on our permanent book shelf!

With thanks to Quadrille for the review copy.

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Hix Oyster & Chop House is (currently) available at Amazon for £15.75.

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Creamy, Dreamy Paneer Malai

This post was first published as a guest post on Maunika Gowardhan's Cookinacurry blog back in June.

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You know how people sometimes talk about second generation immigrants as slightly lost souls - neither entirely comfortable in the land from whence their parents came nor completely integrated into the land of their birth?

Well, that's not me.

I was born in London in the early seventies to two doctors who emigrated from India a few years before I was born. My sister came along 3 years (and five minutes) later. Throughout our childhood, we were brought up to have a strong connection to our relatives in India – indeed we visited them every few years, which we loved. But we were also brought up as British kids, free to take onboard our local culture, without the stricter cultural and behavioural strictures that many other second generation children were, in my admittedly subjective opinion, shackled with.

That applied to food too – mum regularly cooked Indian food but she also taught herself Italian, French, Chinese and, of course, British dishes from cookery books and by trial and error. We probably had Indian food once or twice a week, if that. And we travelled a lot too, in our holidays, to wonderfully exotic places and mum would often bring home a recipe or two such as peanut soup from South America, something she still makes today.

What all this boils down to is that, whilst we'd often help mum in the kitchen, we never really learned to cook Indian food in any meaningful way – we didn't pick up the techniques, the instinctive use of spices and wide repertoire of dishes that we might have resulted from a more traditional upbringing.

(Of course, I think my parents got it absolutely right – I feel a pride in my extra cultural heritage, I am very happy in my brown skin, I will always cherish my links with India. But I am first and foremost British).

When I went to university, I soon realised I could more readily cook a roast beef dinner than a keema curry and turned to mum for help when I needed an Indian fix, phoning for recipes and snatches of advice during term time or bending her ear during trips home. A few years later, my sister and I both implored mum to write down all our best-loved of her Indian recipes in a more organised manner, so that we might stand a chance of perfecting our family favourites.

Mum started laboriously writing recipes onto index cards, two copies of each, of course. It was slow work. Not long afterwards, an Indian cousin of ours who'd moved from India to Europe asked if he might have a copy, so he too could recreate the tastes of home. At which point, the idea of a website came up. Mum's brother pointed out that a website would allow all the family in India (plus some in America too) to contribute to the recipe collection, not to mention benefit from it too.

That was how Mamta's Kitchen came to be born, back in 2001. Since then, it's become so much more than its original intention – a family cookbook on the web. It's become a resource visited and valued by cooks from all around the world and mum, my husband Pete and I (who run it together) love the positive vibe of the whole thing.

Just like many of our non-Indian visitors, the first place I turn to when I need an Indian recipe is the website!

Recently, I was invited to attend a fantastically fun event – FoodUrchin's imu for which he buried an entire lamb in what looked like a grave in his back garden, along with lots of very hot rocks and things on fire. It's a Hawaiian tradition the idea for which he found in a book.

All the guests were tasked with bringing something for the table. With all that meat cooking away slowly in the earth, I decided to bring something vegetarian, opting for this simple paneer malai recipe.

I'd never made it before and, even when it came out of the oven, at FoodUrchin's house, I worried that it would be too bland to stand up against the robust flavours of the wonderful baba ghanoush, parmesan biscuits, salads, sauces, freshly made breads and dips that others had created. But, to my delight and relief, it went down very well indeed – I had many requests for the recipe.

Here it is as my mum makes it:

Mamta's Kitchen Paneer Malai

Ingredients
350 grams paneer
-first marinade
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 heaped tablespoon ginger root, freshly ground or finely grated
1 tablespoon garlic, freshly ground or finely grated or crushed
1.5 teaspoons salt
-second marinade
2 tablespoons full fat cream cheese
3 tablespoons full fat sour cream or thick yoghurt
2 teaspoons corn flour (not maze flour)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon sweet paprika powder for colour
3 red or green fresh chillies, finely chopped (red chillies look nicer)
1 tablespoon. coriander leaves, finely chopped
A few strands of saffron, soaked in 1 tablespoon of warm water
1 teaspoon garam masala

Notes: I used shop-bought paneer. You can make your own, which will be a little more crumbly, following this recipe. I used full fat sour cream. I didn't have any fresh chillies or paprika so I used some very hot red chilli powder instead. I omitted the saffron completely.

Method

• Cut Paneer into roughly 2 inch/5cm pieces.

• Place vinegar in a bowl and add salt, ginger and garlic. Mix.

• Add Paneer cubes, mix and marinate for 1 hour.
  
• Preheat the oven to 200˚C.
  
• Make a paste of the cream cheese, sour cream, egg, chillies, coriander, saffron, paprika and corn flour. (Mix this by hand rather than using a food processor, as a processor will reduce it to a thin runny liquid).

• Lift Paneer cubes pieces from the first marinade, leaving the liquid behind (but taking some of the ginger and garlic solids, if you like). Add them to 2nd marinade and gently turn to coat well. Allow to stand for an hour (or longer).

• Line a tray with aluminium foil and cook for 10-20 minute, turning once or twice, to ensure even cooking.

• They are ready when the marinade has formed a firm crust on the paneer cubes and they have started to take on a little colour at the edges.

• If you do not have a grill or oven, you can stir-fry them in a heated wok in 2 tablespoons oil.

Mum would usually serve these cubes on a bed of lettuce with some lemon wedges, but in this case, they were eaten straight from the oven dish, in very short order!

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Pickled Gherkins, How I Love Thee!

I have always loved pickled gherkins. Many's the time I've come to the chagrined realisation, as I munch one straight from the jar, then another and then one more, that I have eaten an entire jar in one sitting!

Over the last several years, Pete and I have gradually converted our back garden into what we refer to as our home lottie (but which should, more accurately, be called a kitchen garden). Each year we’ve added a few more vegetables and fruits to the mix.

This year, for the first time, we're growing gherkins.

It’s a confusing word, is gherkin.

The cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is thought to have originated in foothills of Himalayas, possibly from wild cucumbers (Cucumis hardwickii). Certainly, it's been cultivated in India for more than 3000 years and also known in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and China. of course, it's now found worldwide.

There is also the West Indian gherkin (Cucumis anguria), a related but different species.

But usually when we talk about gherkins in Europe, we’re not talking about Cucumis anguria but about a set of cultivars of Cucumis sativus (cucumber).

To make it more confusing still, as it has long been common to preserve gherkin cultivars by pickling them in vinegar, the word gherkin has become synonymous with any type of pickled cucumber – gherkin cultivar or not.

I’ve even had some people insist that there’s no such thing as a gherkin, that it’s just a term for pickled cucumbers!

So, what is a cultivar? A cultivar is simply a variety of a plant that, over time, has been deliberately selected for specific desirable characteristics – for example, there are several thousand varieties of tomatoes of all colours, shapes and sizes and varying hugely in taste, disease resistance, yield.

Cucumbers come in many shapes and sizes too, from spherical yellow ones to long, slender ones with thick dark green skins. Some are juicy and full of seeds, others are virtually seedless. Some have bumpy, ridged skins, others are smoothly lustrous. Some taste quite bitter whilst others have a mild, almost sweet flavour, similar to that of melons, which are also part of the Cucurbitaceae family (as are gourds, marrows, squashes and pumpkins).

The gherkins we are growing are a cultivar of cucumber (Cucumis sativus) called 'Diamant' F1 Hybrid.

Gherkins are well suited for pickling.

And the first four picked just had to be pickled, didn't they? Oh, yes!

But which recipe to use? There are so many variations, from sharp to sweet, with dill or without, nothing but gherkin or with some onion and garlic thrown in, not to mention the choice of spices…

The majority of the recipes I found use a ready-bought pickling spice but I decided to make my own.

I simply combined a few whole spices, crushed them a little to let the flavours escape more readily, popped them into one of those make-your-own-teabags pouches before steeping them in malt vinegar. (Malt vinegar because I have lots left over from when I made lemon pickle).

The gherkins I sliced into halves or quarters and salted overnight in the fridge, before pouring off the resulting liquid, washing them gently and patting them dry.

Into my pickling vinegar I dissolved sugar (to taste) before pouring it into my (sterilised) jar full of gherkins (and a couple of garlic cloves).

I made these on the 18 June and want to leave them at least a couple of months before I crack open the jar.

I made a second batch on the 11 July. This time, instead of salting the gherkins on a plate, I poured lightly salted boiling water over them in a bowl, let it cool down and then put it into the fridge overnight. I also added a higher volume of sugar to the vinegar (which I'd steeped with the same pickling spice teabag for several hours). The cucumber pieces were put into hot sterilised jars and the hot vinegar poured over.

I'll let you know how they turn out!

Recipe for Pickling Spice Mix

1 teaspoon yellow mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon powdered allspice
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon cardamom seeds (measure after removing from pods)
1-2 bay leaves
1-2 small pieces cassia bark

• Crush whole spices, leaves and bark and combine with the ground spices.

Addendum: We opened the jars of gherkins in May/June 2011. Both worked well, but I preferred the texture and higher sugar content of the second batch. I shall be making these again if we get a decent yield of cucumbers in coming months!

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Wild Garlic Part 2: Ramsons Flower Tempura

In Wild Garlic Part 1 I shared my first wild garlic foraging and cooking experience, using the leaves of the ramsons plant (allium ursinum) as stuffing in a roast chicken. That was at the beginning of May. Near the end of the month, Pete and I spent a lovely long weekend down in Dorset, planned around attendance on Mat Follas' foraging course.

Driving along the pretty, narrow, winding lanes of this corner of rural Dorset I was struck repeatedly by just how prolific wild garlic is there. Vast numbers blanket grassy verges in swathes of green and white. Driving with the window open means an almost constant whiff of pungent garlicky goodness. Given the abundance, it amazes me that we associate garlic with French cooking, and not with food from South West England!

During the weekend, we both enjoyed dishes based on wild garlic at Mat's restaurant, we picked and munched on fresh, raw flowers and stems during the foraging course and we inhaled it's scent during each car journey we made.

At Mark Hix's Lyme Regis Oyster & Fish House, I even had deep fried ramsons flowers in my starter, though I didn't yet know that ramsons = wild garlic and didn't make the connection.

So much of wild garlic was there in the area that I decided to forage a big bag of it just before we returned to London. In the country corner we chose, I carefully collected a carrier bag full of flowers on their long, crunchy stems and when I turned away and back again, I couldn't even spot a gap in the thick carpet of flower heads.

Having very recently seen a recipe for elderflower tempura (and influenced by the Hix starter too) I was eager to tempura my bounty of fresh flowers.

We haven't made tempura before so checked a few recipe books and followed a very basic recipe, though next time I'll aim for a thinner batter and use carbonated water, which we didn't have in the house.

With their long firm stems, it was easy to dip each flower head into the batter, transfer it into the hot oil and lift it out to drain afterwards.

We enjoyed the flowers with some absolutely delicious grilled bacon from Denhay Farms, who we visited during our weekend trip. It was a perfect light meal which summed up our little trip.

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Urban Farming with Celia Brooks Brown

Books on growing your own fruit and vegetables seem to be ten a penny at the moment, as publishers leap onto the latest bandwagon, keen to milk the home farming phenomenon. Often dull and weighty tomes, they add little to the existing excellent literature already available.

Celia Brook Brown's New Urban Farmer makes a refreshing change, steering clear of the temptation to reinvent the wheel and offering instead a well-balanced mix of engaging, personal narrative about her own urban farming awakening, lots of easy-to-digest practical advice and a selection of recipes for the resulting tasty fresh produce too.

For me, it's a joy to read because it echoes what we have found (my husband and I) and much of how we have felt during our own urban farming journey.

We started growing vegetables in our back garden, gosh it must be over ten years ago now. Gradually, year on year, we'd grow more and more different kinds of vegetables and more and more volume until we finally decided to convert the whole of our back garden into what should rightly be called a kitchen garden, but I more commonly think of as a home allotment. A few years back we even invested in a beautiful big greenhouse and new shed; very exciting! And this year we've finally introduced some fruit with a new apple tree, some raspberry canes, wild strawberries and a rhubarb plant. Whilst we do have a few fruit and vegetable gardening bibles, which are invaluable reference, we've learned a great deal by trial and error plus lots of welcome advice from more experienced friends and family.

And both of us have strong memories of helping green-fingered parents. Pete's dad worked hard on his allotment and produced a good part of the (large) family's diet, roping the kids in to help with many of the gardening chores. My mum loves gardening and I have vivid recollections of the little plots she assigned to my sister and I, in which we grew whatever flowers and vegetables we wanted, arranged in our own haphazard designs. Her garden today, even in winter, is an oasis of greenery, enlivened by riotous colour and scent during the warmer months. And, to my envy (no question in my mind as to why the colour of envy is green!) she can grow coriander; something I just can't seem to keep alive!

The beauty of growing your own fruit and vegetables is that you can do as much or little as you wish. Whether it's growing a few tomato plants and herbs in a window box or in a few pots in the garden or giving over a small patch of an otherwise leisure-focused garden to tomatoes, beans, strawberries and lettuces or going the whole hog and getting an allotment (or converting the entire garden as we have done) - it's hugely satisfying and addictive to eat what you have sown, nurtured and brought to fruition.

And with her injection of personal experiences – she has clearly learned by trial and error, success and failure – Celia makes it clear that urban farming is not only possible but readily achievable for anyone who wants to give it a go. As she points out in her introduction, roughly half the population of the earth are city-dwellers. Urban farming not only provides us access to the freshest possible produce, it also gives us the chance to reconnect to nature and improve the quality of our lives.

Celia catching up at the allotment after a couple of months away

Keen to meet with Celia in person and talk more about her urban farming experiences, I met her at her allotment on a very, very, very hot and sunny day, where I filmed a short interview. As you'll see, I'm an appalling interviewer and an even less skilled cameraman (so used to shooting stills that I forgot not to turn the little point and shoot I used into portrait orientation) but I hope the videos will still be of interest. Apologies for the strange semi-black-and-white effect in the last video – I managed to switch into some odd mode and couldn't work out how to switch out of it!

So what about the book – what does it contain?

In the Introduction, Celia tells us how she came to have an allotment before going on to share vegetable plot basics from location to tools to composting to protection to hardening off and more. There are tips on growing in an allotment, a home garden and in containers. And then the book is presented in monthly chapters, running through what needs to be done when, and the many tips Celia has learned along the way.

Even as an experienced vegetable gardener, there were plenty of useful tips for me – from using the spring shoots of winter brassicas to growing only one variety of sweet corn (cross pollination of more than one leads to ill-formed kernels) to using old, tough leeks to make a leek stock to enjoying bolting rocket flowers in salads to keeping supermarket herbs alive longer by gently separating the numerous plants crammed into the tiny container… each page had me scribbling notes to myself.

And there were also many tips which had me shaking my head in agreement – we too use takeaway containers (plus foil catering trays rescued from party events and the plastic punnets in which we buy strawberries and mushrooms) as seed trays; we've had huge success sprinkling broken egg shells around plants to create a physical barrier against slugs and snails; we also like to plant marigolds and nasturtiums as companion plants and we also leave a little patch of wild flowering weeds, all of which attract pollinating insects.

Lastly, there are the recipes – Celia is an experienced food writer and cook and shares many of her favourite ways to use her allotment bounty. I'm looking forward to trying pea and feta egg cups, parmesan potato cakes with summer herbs, warm courgette salad with parmesan crackling and apple and thyme tart with boozy toffee, amongst many others!

Although it's June now, by the time I'm posting this, I would still recommend you pick up a copy of this if you'd like encouragement, inspiration and a final push to join the ranks of urban farmers. There are still fruit and vegetables you can grow this year if you're quick, and you can certainly start planning and preparing for next year already!

Many thanks to Quadrille for my review copy and to Celia Brooks Brown for welcoming me to her allotment (and for her gift of rocket seeds).

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New Urban Farmer by Celia Brook Brown is currently available from Amazon for just £8.24 (normal cover price £14.99).

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Spicy Green Tomato Ketchup

We've been growing veg in our back garden for several years, increasing the varieties and volumes each year. In 2009 we ended up with an unexpectedly large number of tomato plants. Tomato plants which need sun to ripen. In a summer which didn't really give us much sun. At all!

Having had such lovely feedback on the first batch of spicy tomato ketchup I made back in July (to my grandfather's recipe, for sale on my one-off Covent Garden stall) I figured it would be even better (psychologically, if not taste-wise) if I made it with tomatoes grown by our own fair hands!

I didn't take any photos of the two batches I made in September, one red and one green.

But I made another really large batch with the several kilos of green tomatoes I finally accepted were never going to ripen and harvested in early October.

For some reason I forgot to blog it, but as I just found the photos and really like the recipe, I decided late is better than never!

I think I worked a little too hard when mashing the tomato through the sieve as the ketchup ended up with tiny but visible fragments of tomato seeds through it. These don't spoil the taste, or even the texture, on eating, but make it look less visually appealing than the two earlier batches.

The actual colour is greener, but I've messed up the white balance on these and didn't
manage to correct it properly when processing the images. Sorry!

The recipe I followed is my grandfather's one for spicy tomato ketchup, on Mamta's Kitchen. This recipe uses ripe red tomatoes. For green tomato ketchup, omit the optional red peppers and add extra sugar, to taste.

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Where's Your Pork Chop? Sorry, Mate - It's All Veggie Today!

Some of you might have come across FoodUrchin Dan's Where's My Pork Chop? project on the interwebs. Heck, some of you may even have participated already, responsible (by dint of your rather fabulous offerings*) for my nervousness and feelings of not being worthy.

For those who haven't, let me explain. Dan's job involves some lonely, low-spirited, lugubrious**, late-night shifts during which he not only makes do with the most depressing of supermarket ready-meals for dinner, he does so whilst enviously reading, via food blogs and twitter, the delicious feasts being enjoyed by the rest of the foodie community. Torture! So, in his inimitable, rapscallion way, he has successfully persuaded the denizens of London Foodie Land to feed him with a share of their home-made creations instead! Of course, he's not a scrounger, our FoodUrchin, not at all, so he's exchanged these culinary comforters for goodies ranging from home-made chutneys, to spoils from his allotment, to descendents of his sourdough starter (Veronica), to picking up the bill for a smashing brunch.

For our little exchange, it was the latter, and we met for delicious Eggs Florentine at Canteen, in the Southbank Centre. Thanks for that, Daisy - very tasty! (Daisy being what I most commonly call Dan, for a number of reasons... none of which I'll go into here).

So, what did Daisy get from me (and Pete, who helped me make it all)?

We opted for a veggie selection from Mamta's Kitchen, of Shahi Paneer and Egg Curry.

Both dishes start out almost identically with cumin seeds, onion, tomato and spices

Egg Curry is one of my favourites and is both easy and economical to make. Mum reckons it's also a great option when unexpected guests arrive at meal times as she always has eggs in the fridge, tinned tomatoes on the shelf and spices in the spice rack! I would recommend including the asafoetida which counteracts one of the, ahem, after-effects of boiled egg consumption!

Incidentally, on this occasion we used home-grown tomatoes puréed in the Magimix, in place of tinned tomatoes, in order to use up the last of the garden's summer bounty.

Egg curry

The Shahi Paneer uses a ready-made spice mix {gasp!}, combined with some additional spices and an arterie-clogging volume of butter and cream - hey, it is a paneer dish fit for the shahs! (Paneer, by the way, is a fresh Indian cheese, bland on it's own but great within tasty dishes like this one).

Shahi paneer

We had itended to make naan bread too, but didn't get around to it, and went for basmati rice instead. And I picked up a box of colourful goodies from our local Indian sweet shop, Mahavir Sweet Mart. I can't claim to know what they all were, as I picked based solely on colour and appearance! The selection did include my favourite freshly-made cashew-nut and pistachio roll! Yum!

Read about the meal from Dan's perspective, here.

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* Yes I'm talking about you, Linda of With Knife and Fork and Jan from The Ample Cook and Naomi aka The Ginger Gourmand!
** Come on, at least be grateful I didn't cram "lachrymose" into there too!

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