Lucknow-style black leg chicken biryani

Tomato and cucumber raita, chilli and mango, and a fennel salad

Chicken biryani

MrCurryclub’s identical twin brother came down from Inverness to stay this weekend. The weather was damp and chilly, and the boys were feeling a bit fragile after Saturday’s rugby marathon, so a warm welcome to Curryclub was in order. I decided to make a chicken biryani from the Cinnamon Kitchen’s cookbook, with  Maddhur Jaffrey’s refreshing tomato and cucumber raita on the side. Our lovely house guest whipped up a fresh mango and red chilli chutney, and a refreshing salad of fennel slivers, lemon juice and olive oil.

The biryani recipe was a bit fiddly, but well worth the effort, despite a slight turmeric-in-eye incident (don’t ask). It was really satisfying to dust the cobwebs off our bottle of exotic-looking rosewater, although I’m yet to find out what the alternative ingredient – screwpine – is. The whole dish was lovely and rich, without a “black leg” in sight, and the tangy salads were a great addition. The quantities in the recipe seemed a bit off, however, so I used half the suggested amount of water and salt for cooking  the rice (1.5 not 3 litres, and 1.5 tbsp rather than 3). We substituted green chillis for red ones, and didn’t have any mace unfortunately, but this wasn’t a noticeable omission.

Marks: 8/10 for the whole shebbang

The perfect tonic – chana keema, naan bread & pomegranate raita

Pomegranate raita

Chana keema and naan bread

It’s rare for me to be up past midnight nowadays (how embarassing), but we went to a 30th birthday party on Saturday night and didn’t roll home till 4am. A hearty feed was required.  Mr Curryclub and I combined forces to make not one, but three new recipes: chana keema (lamb mince stir-fried with chickpeas) from Food of the Grand Trunk Road, by Anirudh Arora and Hardeep Singh Kohli, and pomegranate riata and naan bread from the Cinnamon Kitchen’s cookbook.

The naan breads were concrete hard, but the other dishes were fab. A recipe from the Punjab section of the book – an area in the far northwest of India bordering on Jammu and Kashmir –the chana keema was totally moreish. Flavoured with smoky black cardamon, bay leaves, green and powdered chill, garlic and ginger paste (jars of which I’ve just discovered in my local deli), ground coriander and cumin, this was the perfect warming dish for staving off the winter chill and the hangover gremlins. The recipe was seasoned with a teaspoon of garam masala and livened up with lemon guice, ginger julienne and a sprinkling of fresh coriander. The raita was similarly likeable – simultaneously tart and sweet, it was definitely worth the effort of picking the seeds out one by one like a chimp.

Belly full, I realized that I haven’t bought any takeaway curries at all this year – progress indeed.

Marks: 8/10 for the whole meal (excepting the naan breads – the leftovers were much tastier with pilau rice)

Cinnamon Kitchen’s “Old Delhi-style butter chicken”

Smell the butter

Not bad for a day’s work

Dinner on Sunday night was the Cinnamon Kitchen’s “Old Delhi-style butter chicken” to warm the heart and keep out the cold rain. The dish featured not one, but three dairy products – butter, cream and natural yoghurt – and was quite fiddly to make with various sieving and blending operations to perform. The end result was pretty tasty but a bit lacking in depth of flavour for me (despite the lashings of chilli) and produced vast quantities of washing-up too. I think the flavour will have improved in a few day’s time once the spices have got acquainted with each other better. Next time I would grill rather than oven-cook the chicken to give it a nice crisp, punchy flavour.

Marks: 7/10 (will re-mark once I’ve tried the leftovers)

To be continued…

A busy weekend here at Curryclub – dinner at the Cinnamon Club on Saturday and home-made Cinnamon Kitchen’s “Old Delhi-style butter chicken” tonight. Write-ups to follow…

Spicy February triple-header

Banana tartin

February’s Curryclub started on a high with not one, but three memorable new recipes…

This Saturday evening we planned to go and see Django Unchained but MrCurryclub decided to make the “spice-braised shoulder of lamb” from Vivek Singh’s Cinnamon Kitchen cookbook. Unctious and melt-in-the-mouth after  3 hours in the oven we missed the cinema and ended up staying in to watch The Dictator” instead… The film wasn’t up to much but this was a grand old dish and would be great to try again when we have guests.

Dinner is served

Look at the leg on that

Spicy goodness up-close

Tonight I re-used the leftover lamb (approximately 350g) to make a delicious lamb pilaf from the Ginger Pig’s Ginger Pig Meat Book. Lightly spiced, this was a nice easy dish to make with basmati rice, onion, tomato, and big bunches of fresh parsley and coriander. Deceptively rich, colourful and moreish, this was even more satisfying because it used up our leftovers so well.

Fiesta time

A hive of activity

One fine lookin’ pilaf

For dessert I made Cinnamon Kitchen’s “spiced banana tartin”. Melting the caramel from scratch was fun– I had no idea how quickly it would cool though, so it was quite hard to handle. The recipe’s slight nod to Indian cooking was the addition of crushed pink peppercorns; I’ve been trying to find a use for them for a while, and despite my initial reservations they were a perfect counterpart to the cloying sweetness of the bananas and caramel. Delicious.

Caramel-geddon

Pink peppercorns…say wha?

Marks:

Cinnamon Kitchen’s “spice-braised shoulder of lamb” 8/10

The Ginger Pig’s “spiced lamb pilaf” 9/10

Cinnamon Kitchen’s “spiced banana tarte tartin” 7/10