Now calm down, don’t get excited. There is no meat in this recipe whatsoever. Occasionally I eat veggie sausages. I don’t know why as I can never get them to taste as nice as the ones in pubs. I sometimes suspect the ones in the pubs aren’t veggie at all

I usually boil the sausages in gravy then eat them with a huge mound of mash. And there it is… the real reason for the meal….an excuse to have a huge plateful of buttery, creamy, yummy, cheese-y mash.

Today that all changed. I am now converted to veggie sausages and the reason is the Cauldron sausage and bean pie recipe. I only had a tiny tin of beans 120g, so made up the bulk with half a Halls veggie haggis frozen on  Burns night and a quarter can of chopped tomatoes.  I used a packet of Cauldron Lincolnshire sausages.

My goodness the result was delicious. Even meat eating Mr Plummy Mummy enjoyed it enough to have two helpings. I was grinning with full belly smug satisfaction which was only slightly marred when he said it would taste really good with meat sausages and meat haggis. Silently, in my mind and under my breath I blow giant  raspberries at his love of meat – I’ll stick to this pie from now on!

I haven’t done a Chains post in a while. It’s not for lack of knitting/crochet as my hands have been busy. Sometimes to the point of pain. But I haven’t finished any objects in a while … I run out of yarn and have to order more, I frog a piece because it’s just not right then frog again and again. Or I just put it down as I cannot be bothered to finish it. But once in a while, I sneak in a quick one night job. And this Saturday, I did a one night job for myself. A new neckwarmer to match the walking jacket hubby gave me for Christmas. It’s not a scarf as I only had one ball of purple. I was going to make it all different colours but decided plain purple was best. The stitch is diagonal box stitch which is explained very well on the Crochet Cabana site

I’m pretty damn chuffed especially as the ball of yarn only cost me £1

Indian superfood by Gurpareet Bains – a nice glossy book which tries to show how good some Asian ingredients are. I’m a bit surprised that he hasn’t included okra and kerala which are both known for health giving properties. However, there are some intriguing recipes – I need to figure out how to make the chocolate and chicken curry into a vegetarian dish.

The Curry Secret by Kris Dhillon – How to cook real Indian restaurant meals at home. Most of the restaurants in the UK are Bengali rather than Indian. There are of course restaurants for other areas of Indian including Gujarati, Punjabi and South Indian restaurants but your bog standard curry house is usually Bengali. In our house we never use terms such as madras, dopiaza, vindaloo etc. It’s one of the reasons I like eating in curry houses as the taste is very different from what I cook. However, if you eat out often you might suspect that the sauce is all the same. And reading this book you would be partly right – there is a base Curry sauce which the cook then adds to. I guess this is similar to my vagar which often consists of onion, garlic, ginger and chili base. I’m going to try out the base sauce from the book as soon as I figure out what green ginger is. Also again, many of the dishes here are meaty ones….who knows maybe hubby will pick it up and cook for himself!

Indian Regional Cooking by Sumana Ray – a bit of a happy mistake this one. I had a Sumana Ray book which was lost as part of a horrendous house move. I mourned the loss of that book as I referred to it often as it showed how to make so many foods easily. I thought I was ordering a replacement for that book but what arrived was not the same. The book I got includes meat and fish recipes but on looking through many of the recipes (and indeed the photos) from my old one are there. So this is the old book plus more. I love the sidebars which show step by step how to make things which helpful text and photos. There are loads that I want to try from this book so look out for future recipe reviews.

I swear I took pictures of the finished article but I cannot find them in my phone or camera. So again, you will have to imagine what it looked like. I absolutely hate when recipes don’t show you what the results are supposed to look like so I apologise…next time I’ll take lots of photos and update here. The filling is cooked before hand in a saucepan, then the filled peppers are roasted in the oven.

Ingredients:

• 6-7 mini peppers
• 200g potatoes – This is the washed and peeled weight.
• 2 tbs groundnut oil
• 1 tsp cumin seeds (jeera)
• 1 medium onion (dhungri) – peeled, diced very finely
• 2 inch piece of ginger (adu) – washed, peeled and grated
• 7-8 curry leaves (limda), central stalk of each leaf removed and then all chopped finely
• 1 fresh green chili (lilly murchu)
• 1 tsp salt (nimak)
• 1/2 tsp chili powder (lal murcha)
• 1/4 tsp turmeric (hurder)
• 1/4 tsp coriander cumin powder (dhana jeeru)
• 2/3 tbs olive oil

Preparation:

• Wash the peppers, then slice off the stalk end and scoop out the innards
• When I cooked them, I found the filling was oozing out of all the peppers except the one I had slit down the side by mistake. So slit each on down one side

• Have the  roasting dish ready with the olive oil smeared over the bottom
• Dice the potatoes and them boil to the point a knife goes through them easily but they aren’t too watery. Mash in a bowl and set aside to cool.

Cooking:

• Preheat oven to 180 degrees (160 degrees fan oven)
• In a heavy based pan, heat oil. Once warm add the cumin seeds and let them sizzle
• Add onions and cook until they are golden brown (about 5 minutes on med heat, stir often)
• Add the curry leaves, ginger and chopped chili to the mix and cook for a minute or so
• Add the spices, cook for another minute or two stirring frequently to prevent sticking.
• Take off the heat and mix into the mash. At this point taste the mixture to check seasoning. Add more salt if necessary
• Fill each pepper with 2/3 tsp of the mix and lay flat in the roasting dish. I had a few spoons left over so just rolled them into small balls and put into the roasting dish too
• Place in oven to cook. I cooked until the peppers skin starting to char but not so they were too soft (about 20 minutes in my oven). Turn each pepper half way through cooking so that both sides get charred slightly.
• Serve with rice or a salad.

Now before we go on, let’s get one thing clear – I am not talking about the curry plants that are sold in some garden centres which have a very strong curry like smell Heichrysum italicum. I bought a bunch of these to keep the cats out of my garden. The plants that grew very well only succeeded in being cat barriers when they had grown so big the cats couldn’t get in. As far as I know, the leaves aren’t edible.

I am talking about Murraya koenigii. If you go to an asian supermarket, they are easy to find. They will be in the fresh herb section next to the coriander (another fave). The leaves should be glossy green and attached to their branches. You can pick each one off individually, or be lazy like me and just run your fingers down the stalk and just pull them all off in one go. Wash them well in cold water. Chuck out any bruised/black ones and freeze the rest. They last for ages (which is my way of saying, I don’t know how long you can freeze them but it’s ages)

Pah to Valentines. I don’t need a Hallmark holiday to tell me when to tell my loved one that he is loved. He gets told regularly enough thank you. And he gets fed with lots of love on a daily basis. So I say, “don’t buy me a card”, “we won’t be doing silly gifts will we dear” and such stuff. But what I say, is not what I do. I cannot resist buying a silly card and showing him my love through food. This year, the treat was chocolate biscuits using a recipe from the Green and Black’s Chocolate Recipes book which was a Christmas gift from the sister-in-law and has been sat on my shelf unused for a couple of years. Most of the recipes need too many ingredients for an inpromptu bit of baking. But today, I was lucky to have a choice of a cake or a biscuit. The little one chose Breton Butter Biscuits which are an easy biscuit made of butter, flour, sugar and egg. I added in a teaspoon of powdered ginger and topped the lot of with melted Green and Black’s Chocolate with ginger. Hope that he appreciates the burnt fingers as I dipped lovingly into the hot choc sauce. The results – well spicy, just like my other half loves!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/05/londons-asian-supermarkets

Generally, if you are looking for a specific type of food e.g. Gujarati, then head to an area that has many Gujaratis. Wikipedia supplies this breakdown of where each different group are mostly found.

If you are looking for Gujarati vegetarian sweets and snacks (like chevda, ghatia etc) then I wholeheartedly recommend Gayatri which is in Kingsbury – be prepared to queue on festival days. Oh damn, now I’m hungry and missing London :S

You can find them at

103 Gray Street
Broughty Ferry
DD5 2DN
call us on: 01382 738 939
email: tasty@clementineofbroughtyferry.com

Goodness Me

106 Gray Street  Dundee, Angus DD5 2DN
01382 736 344

What a funny name for anyone who saw the successful TV show Goodness Gracious Me. We popped into Clementine of Broughty Ferry shop on our way to the beach yesterday as Granny wanted to get some veg for soup at the church. It’s a sweet little organic food shop just by the level crossing. I wonder if they get any trade from people waiting for trains to go by…we were at the crossing for over 5 minutes waiting from trains going to Edinburgh and in the other direction, one to Aberdeen.

The interior of the shop is well laid out (you know I have no photos right?). I was a little disappointed that the herbs weren’t all grown in Scotland. However, all the vegetables looked very fresh and I walked away with the last of the okra (from India), a packet of coriander (from Spain), a Dutch Aubergine (from???) and some gorgeous flat mushrooms (Scottish….yippeeee). Like a plonker, I completely forgot to pick up the French garlic which first caught my attention. It isn’t cheap but as it’s so fresh, it’s likely to last longer than big chain supermarkets produce.  They also sell bags of ingredients and recipes which is a nice idea for someone dashing in to make something for supper.

I’m was never keen on ratatouille… it’s a bit too much like nut roast in being very “vegetarian”. In the olden days before being veggie was acceptable, ratatouille was often the only offering on a restaurant menu, and it was awful.

However, times have changed (or is it me? or was it the film Ratatouille????). I went for a Delia recipe of oven roasted ratatouille. I started off cooking it on the hob, the moved my casserole pot to the oven to roast it off. I also missed off the coriander seeds because I forgot them but the results were great so I don’t mind. The first time, I cooked it with basil however, tonight I used crushed chili seeds instead. Both were equally yum.

On both occasions, I ate it with cous cous with a healthy squeeze of lemon and 1 tbs of finely chopped coriander stalks. It’s so delicious and a bonus for me is that it can be frozen as for some very mad reason Mr Plummy Mummy will not eat cooked aubergine or courgettes….more fool he.

As it’s a Delia recipe, I can’t copy it here. However,as the pictures I took were just so colourful, I cannot help but post them up.

I like puddings that have vegetables in them – showing the sweet side of their nature. It also makes me feel I’m getting one of my five-a-day (ignoring all the sweet stuff). A classic is carrot cake. Or in India, carrot halwa which is a sweet pudding made from carrots, sugar, milk and a few other ingredients. I normally eat bottle gourd (known as “dudhi” in Gujarati) as a shak/curry. Occasionally, if I add chick pea lentils it can be a delicious dal. Yesterday I decided to try out an Indian dessert called Dudhi Halwa tweaking the recipe slightly to make a smaller amount .

Indian desserts are hardly ever good for you – they often contain sugar, clarified butter (ghee), milk and khoya which is made from buffalo milk and is a creamy ingredient. This is no exception – however, as it’s so sweet, you are unlikely to have too much. And anyway, a treat every now and then keeps a girl happy.

Once again, I apologise for the blurred images. Must must MUST sort out my camera soon. Hope you can see OK.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup bottle gourd. Peel hard skin off, finely grate the flesh. If yours has seeds in it, remove these before grating. 1 cup is roughly half a dudhi – I put the other cup of grated dudhi in the freezer as an experiment.
• 1 cup full fat milk
• 2 tbs clarified butter / ghee (see prep below)
• 1 cardamom dry roasted then powdered in a pestle and mortar (discard the outer skin, pound black seeds only)
• 2 tbs caster sugar (granulated would do just as well but as caster sugar is finer, it dissolved faster).
• For garnish – 4 almonds. Soaked in hot water, then remove skin and cut into thin slivers. Also use pistachios if you have them which you just simply slice into slivers.

Method:

Method – as per original recipe. Copied below for convenience. Blurred photos are all mine I’m afraid.

1. Heat a heavy bottom pan over medium heat, add ghee.
2. Add grated doodhi and saute until it turns translucent.
3. Add the milk and bring to boil.
4. Simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. When halwa is almost dry, add sugar, mix well.
6. Stir continuously until moisture has evaporated.
7. Turn off the heat and add cardamom powder, mix well.
8. Garnish with sliced almonds and pista, Serve.