Fred's kitchen notes

Hi everyone. I’m back, after being away for a while. just too much work to do. Who thought that unemployment would be busier than employment. Weird.

In this post, I would like to talk about Indian food, which is a big passion of mine. Before moving to Glasgow in 1996, curry was for me just a yellow powder that you would add to chicken and rice. Nothing too fancy, nothing to really write home about. Never covered as a staple of my food consumption. Then I moved up north, where the aboriginal diet is shite and unhealthy. Other source of nutrition were curry houses and indian take aways. Go once and go twice, I started getting the feel for “real” curries (I guess that real can be only use for what you eat in India) . We tried Ashoka a few times  but my favorite remains Mother India, in Sauchiehall street.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that I love curries. And Hanne does too, meaning that we eat a lot of them at home, on a weekly basis. We are currently making a lot of beans and lentil based dishes, as they are cheap and very easy to make. I do get my inspiration from what I call my culinary bible, which is this cute book called “1000 Indian recipes” by Neelam Batra. I recommend it to anyone.

Before getting into some recipes that I kind of “modified” form the above bible, I think I’d first like to show you what ingredients I used. First of all, spices. No kitchen should be without these guys:

These are the minimum requirements: Turmeric, Garam Masala, Chili powder, Cumin seeds, Cumin powder, Curry madras, Fennel powder, Cardamom powder, Mustard powder, black mustard seeds, Green cardamom pods, Black cardamom pods and Kokkum black. I might have forgotten a few. I’ll change that later. There are many many more spices and herbs that are used in Indian cuisine, but I can say that these are the essentials.

I am a huge fan of turmeric and of green cardamom pods. I try to use them as much as possible, even though many people say that turmeric does not taste of anything and the pods are a veeery aquired taste. They are pretty disturbing if you are not used to them, epsecially if you chew on one.

So this is it for the spice rack. Next will be the legumes. get ready for some colorful photos

Bye bye for now