tl;dr

Well, that didn’t quite go as planned.

What is supposed to happen is the chilli paste sinks down into the jar and a layer of clear vinegar forms on top, which you skim off. This vinegar will contain a good chunk of the capsaicin from the chillis in it (this is the chemical which gives chillis their hot flavour), which calms the sauce down. Except I have no vinegar layer, for whatever reason. So I have an entire jar of very potent, rather sour sauce.

Not that it’s unpleasant — it’s rather tasty, in fact, I just ate a teaspoon of it — but it’s probably not all that useful as a table sauce. I might freeze most of it in ice cube trays and use it as an additive to curries and suchlike. The original recipe says this will keep for months in the fridge but even so I’m not sure I’d get through it all.

Food

I’ve just caught a few of the new Currys advertising spots on Sky One — they sponsor The Simpsons and Futurama now after Domino’s dropped out last year (details).

I’ve seen three of these spots:

• A guy bolts a very large, glossy flatscreen TV to the wall over his mantlepiece. Channel surfing, he finds an exercise program and starts to jump around. Presumably dislodged by his antics, it falls from the wall and shatters to the floor, taking a vase with it for good measure. Cut to a Currys delivery van with two guys who proceed to bolt a new TV to the wall for him.
• An elderly gent is struggling to put his new TV into the back of his car in a car park. Balancing it with one hand while he opens the tailgate, it crashes to the floor. Warily, he shakes the box, accompanied by the sound of broken glass. Cut to “need a hand putting your TV in the car? We can help!”
• A lady is walking through a car park with a large TV in a box. She trips and the box crashes to the concrete. Cut to the same catchphrase.

All three of these ads have really well captured foley; really prominent crunchy shattering glass and plastic.

Now, I understand that they are trying to pitch Currys as a place with value-add services, like carrying things to your car and installing TVs for you. But the strongest mental link they’ve made in my brain is between “Currys” and “very expensive, very broken broken TVs”. Is it me, or is that somewhat wonky marketing?

Professional

Well, not quite, but it did feel that way.

Started on Saturday afternoon when my friend Scott came around. As we were making a curry for tea, I followed his advice and made up a batch of his curry base sauce. He’s taken and modified a number of recipes from a currymaking forum (I can’t remember the name, unfortunately); they are aimed at reproducing, not authentic Indian cuisine, but rather “authentic” takeaway curry. As such, most of the recipes start with a generic base sauce you make in large quantity in advance and typically freeze in small portions. The recipe for this:

700g cooking onions, chopped into 8 pieces
4 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped
15g of fresh ginger root, roughly sliced
1 red (or green) pepper, cut into 16 pieces
120g salad potatoes, peeled and halved
120g carrot, sliced (2-3 carrots)
1 large tomato, quartered
20g coriander stems, finely chopped
200ml vegetable oil
1500ml water
1 tbsp salt

2 tsp cumin powder
1.5 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp Kashmiri mirch (MDH) (or paprika as an alternative)
1 tsp Madras powder (Rajah)
0.5 tsp fenugreek powder

1. Boil all ingredients in a pan, covered, for 45 minutes.
2. Add one (400g) tin of chopped tomatoes and a further 500ml of water.
3. Liquidise thoroughly.
4. Simmer rapidly for a further 30 minutes to reduce volume to around half; you are aiming for 2.65 litres in volume (a depth of 7cm in a 22cm soup pan; go go pi-r-squared).

It looks like this before reduction:

Note the use of vegetable oil, rather than the more traditional ghee. I’m going to try a smaller batch with ghee; Scott thinks it would be too rich. He could well be right.

Then we got drunk and played the drums:

Growing hungry, we decided to make a curry we could actually eat, rather than a vat of generic sauce which, whilst tasty, wasn’t particularly satisfying on its own. For this we followed a pathia recipe of Scott’s own devising:

600g of lamb steaks, diced and pre-fried in one ladle of base sauce and some oil

3 ladles of base sauce
1 onion, finely diced
2 tbs red wine vinegar
1 tbs brown sugar
½ a lemon, cut into wedges
2 plum tomatoes, cut into wedges
Fresh coriander (to taste, as much or as little as you like)
3 tbs vegetable oil
1 tsp mustard seeds

Make a paste of the following ingredients in a blender:
3 fresh or 4 dried red chillies
4 garlic cloves
2 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp turmeric
½ tsp chilli powder

1. Warm base sauce through.
2. Heat oil and fry onion until golden.
3. Add the mustard seeds to the pan and wait for them to pop, then add the paste,  fry for a few minutes. Add red wine vinegar (and stand back from fumes!)
4. Turn up the heat and add 1 ladle of base sauce to the pan and allow it to boil.
5. Add the brown sugar and lemon and a second ladle of base sauce to the pan, keeping the heat up and the contents of the pan moving. Bring back to the boil.
6. Add the pre-cooked lamb. Add a ladle of water if needed to stop the sauce sticking, but make sure it’s hot before moving on.
7. Add the third ladle of base sauce to the pan along with the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.
8. Keep the pan on the hob, cooking through until you get your preferred consistency.
9. Just before removing from the heat, stir through the chopped coriander.

We served this with this pilau rice recipe — which requires timing just a fraction too precise to tackle after half a bottle of Rioja and a few rum’n'cokes. Sorry, guys who ate my overcooked rice.

Here’s the final dish:

The curry there has too much lemon in; being of a “chuck it in” mentality by this point we put the entire lemon in, but it came out just a little too sour. Temperature was just right though, the perfect pathia being (in my opinion) slightly too hot to eat comfortably but so tasty you can’t stop either.

Then we played more drums:

Sunday, following a cooked breakfast, Scott went home and I made a roast dinner with Toby. Whilst waiting for the chicken to roast we thought we’d make some chilli sauce to this recipe:

1. Place chillis in blender
2. Add enough vinegar (the colourless stuff, distilled malt vinegar)
3. Add handful of salt
4. (Optional) add tomato puree, garlic, sugar, and/or anything else
5. Blend, transfer to saucepan
6. Bring to boil for 10 minutes
7. Transfer to a jar and leave covered with a cloth (but with the lid off) for a week
8. Skim the vinegar from the top of the mix and refrigerate

This is what it looked like before blending:

The stuff is… whatever you call it. Not fermenting. Resting perhaps? Anyway, it’s resting now, but I can confirm it’s pretty damned hot (there were a number of bird’s eye chillis in there, so that’s unsurprising).

Food