A Curry Dinner

Here's last week's curry dinner from the freezer, in its earlier incarnation when I first made it before Xmas. The vegetables are large yellow beans - which look a little like penne pasta in this picture - red capsicum, and green spinach.

It was based closely on a Madhur Jaffrey recipe called "Palag Ghosht".  I have actually cooked this before, and last year even blogged it here, but I like this variation even better. In this updated edition, it's a bright and fresh flavoured thing, with the spinach just barely cooked. The original recipe has the spinach cooked for 45 minutes,  which makes it a bit more the spinach puree types that you usually find in Indian restaurants. I also added some extra vegetables.

Recipe: Lamb and Spinach Curry
600g boneless lean lamb
a thumb sized chunk of fresh ginger
7 cloves garlic
2 tblsp whole coriander seed
75ml sunflower oil
1 medium onion, sliced in fine half-rings.
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup natural yoghurt
300g spinach
300g mixed vegetables

* Grind the coriander seed, finely grate the ginger and crush the garlic.
* Cut the lamb into 3cm chunks, and mix in the coriander, ginger and garlic.
* Mix well and set aside for an hour.
* Heat the oil and fry the onion until golden and crisp. Do not let them blacken.
* Remove the onion with a slotted spoon, and blot off oil on kitchen paper.
* Add the lamb and its marinade, with the turmeric, cayenne and salt to the remaining oil.
* Stir well and cover.
* Cook for ten minutes, lifting the lid to stir every couple of minutes.
* Add the yoghurt a tablespoon at a time, stirring well and allowing to simmer before adding the next spoonful.
* Add the fried onions.
* Cover and simmer for 45 minutes, or until the meat is just tender.
* Add sliced beans, capsicum and simmer for ten minutes.
* Add finely shredded spinach leaves, stir well through and cook until just wilted.

Notes: I used hoggett chops - this is old lamb, not quite mutton yet, and you need a specialist butcher or meat grower to get it these days. A few of the market sellers have it in season. It's a little tougher, a little more strongly flavoured, and takes a little longer to cook than lamb.

I use an old cheap blade-cutting coffee grinder for spices. We upgraded to a proper burr grinder for the coffee, and it really makes a difference.

And the final gadget is a newish toy: a mini food processor, about 1 cup capacity. It's excellent for chopping the ginger and garlic, as well as for herbs.

Marmalade Time

The Sunday before last, I dropped into the Belconnen Fresh Food Market, after a trip to Bunnings for more house fixity things. The Bloke has now fixed the leaky dishwasher, hurrah! On advice from Infoaddict in a comment here, I checked out Wiffen's. I'm mostly a Tom's fan, but I'm really happy that I did this. Wiffen's had some good things, including persimmons and mangosteens at $1 a piece. I grabbed a few of those, because I adore mangosteens and hardly ever have them. And I picked up some generic salad & veg stuff that I needed since I didn't make it to the EPIC growers market that Saturday. Green beans, tomatoes, pumpkin, a $2 bag of parsnips. Useful things.

The best of it was that they had Seville oranges! I am excited yet again, as I had run out of marmalade. I've been buying it, but I have yet to find one that to my taste is anywhere near as good as my own. Even the Lynwood Seville, star of the great jar opening saga, is not bitter enough for me. Crankypants' grapefruit was pretty good, and the lime was OK - nicely sharp, but not the bitter I really want. Cumquat isn't bad, either, but nothing beats Seville for me. And now I have made eleven jars! Yay!

My marmalade recipe comes from a former workmate, Airlie Moore. She was the office administrator at the company I last worked for in Sydney. Airlie was raised on a farm, and later raised her own kids in the country. She's one of those wonderfully tough, no-nonsense women without whom executives would crash and burn in chaos. I imagine if she'd been born a decade or two later she might have been PM, or a high-flying CEO or something. And she was also kind and friendly, and very easy to work with as long as you were sensible. Airlie gave me this recipe, which is the best ever. You can see it's an old country recipe from the non-metric ingredients.

Recipe: Airlie's Seville Orange Marmalade
2 lbs Seville Oranges
4 lbs sugar
4 pints water
1 large lemon

Wash the oranges first.
Put whole oranges and water in a large pan.
Cover, and simmer gently for two hours, then allow to cool.
Remove oranges from the water and slice finely, saving the seeds. (see notes)
Add seeds back to the water, and also add the juice and pips of the lemon. (see notes)
Bring to boil and boil rapidly for 5 minutes.
Strain out pips, and return orange slices to the pan.
Boil to reduce by about half.
Add sugar and boil rapidly for 10 minutes, or until set by your preferred test.
Turn off heat and let stand for 15 minutes before jarring.

Notes: The 15 minute stand is to allow a partial set, so the peel can be evenly distributed. Use one lemon per kilo of oranges, and adjust quantities to suit your orange supply simply keeping the ratio. It works out in metric to 2.4 litres/kg. But given the boiling down to "about half", there's no need to be scrupulously exact. I had six oranges, a total of 1.7kg, and used 4L water and 3.4kg of sugar. When you add the sugar, this bulks up a lot - I needed my largest stock pot. You want at least 10cm clearance, and more is better. It froths up a lot as it boils, and can spit a bit.

When you get to the point of slicing the oranges, you can just keep the peel and discard the innards, or you can squeeze the insides through a sieve to get pulp. With the seeds, I like to wrap them in a bit of muslin for easy removal. My oranges this time had no seeds at all, but the lemons were very seedy indeed so that helped. You could use some Jamsetta for pectin, if you like, instead of fussing with seeds.

My preferred set test for jam and marmalade is to put a couple of saucers in the freezer. Drop a quarter teaspoon or so on the edge, leave for a minute, then push on it to see if it wrinkles. Or, if you have a jam thermometer, 105C is the canonical temperature measurement. I tried that and it seemed not right. The wrinkle test actually passed at 108C - which may mean that my thermometer is a little inaccurate. The moral is: don't just trust meter readings, without adding common sense and experience.

In terms of jars, I like to use old vegemite jars. They accumulate easily. I rinse them and their lids in very hot water, then dry them out in the oven. A jam funnel eases the filling procedure remarkably - that's one gadget I use over and over.

Apart from the brilliant result, I also love this recipe for the simplicity of preparation. Anyone who's made marmalade the regular way knows how much of a hassle it is juicing and/or slicing the fruit. When it's soft from the boiling, though, it is dead easy. It's also quite useful because you can do it in stages. Boil oranges one day, cool, add pectin and reduce next day - and if necessary, add sugar and do the jarring the next day after that.

Now, did you see what I did there? There were 13, not 11 jars in the top photo. Did you spot the ringers? Here are the two ringers again, with a new one for comparison. Of the two extras, the part-eaten one is the Lynwood that I decanted into a different jar. The other is from the same recipe, but it is six years old - not even from my last batch, but the one before. It was hiding in the top cupboard stash, behind a lot of jars of chutney. It is almost totally black now, but like wine, marmalade ages well. I detect notes of treacle...

It Aten't Dead

One week on and I still haven't killed it. Though the butter lettuce and rocket are looking alarmingly limp. Let us hope that today's feed and water picks them up.

This is a home hydroponics box from hydropantry, that I bought at the EPIC market last week. It is nifty. You put it in a frost-sheltered but sunny spot, and change the water once a week. Add 40ml of nutrient solution, and it's done until next week. You pick what you want from it as you go.

There are three kinds of lettuce in my planter, plus rocket, spring onions, curly parsley, continental parsley and coriander. We've used some of the red and cos lettuce already. It seems to be doing OK so far, just sitting on the table on the back deck. I think it's quite picturesque - adds a nice dash of green.

When you change the solution, you can put the old water on the garden. It's nice and clean, not smelly like the water from a week long neglected flower vase would be. Which makes sense when you think about it, since there's live roots hanging in there, not cut stems. I used the first batch of leftover water on my new cherry tree, which I am still excited about.

The garden is starting to look spring-like already. It's pretty in the sunshine, even if not exactly warm: the prunus is budding, and bulbs are sprouting among the hellebores and violets and cyclamens down the side that we've paved recently. And the wattle is starting to flower. Alice the wonder-gardener has pruned the trickier things for me and instructed me to feed the citrus. I'd better go do that while I remember.

I wish I had one of these

A frying pan with a temperature sensor in the handle! How amazing is that! And the handle can be removed for washing, too.

Tonight we ate turkey steaks with a quinoa, kale, red capsicum and almond pilaf, loosely based on this recipe. And then I cooked up the last of the ricotta pancake batter for dessert. Three days later, it's not as good as it was. The batter has been covered, in the fridge, of course. It separated slightly, but could be mixed back together and fried up. It doesn't rise as fluffy as the first time, but the pancakes are still OK.

Of course, as is traditional with all pancakes, the first one is lousy. While usually my first pancake is tough from too slow cooking, with this mix, it's easy to burn it by cooking too fast instead. If only I had one of those frying pans...

Gadgets! I has them!

I'm typing in from my laptop, which is sitting on the new "lapinator" pad which I am loving already. A batch of brownies is baking away, but sadly the package did not arrive in time for me to try out the new measuring cup and digital scale-spoon.

The skull & crossbones icecubes are in the freezer. And I'm wondering what to make from the Hungry Scientist Handbook: should it be the glow-in-the-dark lollipops? The edible origami? Dry-ice martinis?

Plus also I can has a sonic screwdriver. Wheee!!!