Quick Indian Cooking

I was having a fairly uneventful week. When this gem appeared on the evening news.

Turns out a passenger aboard a Virgin Mumbai to London flight wrote an impassioned complaint to Sir Richard Branson himself about the Indian food he was served.

The excruciatingly hilarious letter went global in no time. Prompting the maverick entrepreneur to personally apologise and invite the disgruntled one to test food at Virgin’s catering house.

Can I come along too?

For years, I have suffered partly-heated yellow gloop parading as curry on flights back to London from India. The desserts taste worryingly like their plastic packaging. Salads are either freezing cold or brown edged. The dry bread roll devoured with lime pickle would easily qualify as the highlight of the mile-high culinary experience.

No wonder families resort to clicking open tupperware tiffin boxes of parathas and dry palyas and sabzis. Give them cutlery and dinnerware while they’re at it, I say!

Revenge is a dish best served cold. Now we have a vocal champion for our cause. Who didn’t stomach the insult sitting down. May this be a lesson to other airlines. In an age of internet connectivity, food awareness and high consumerism, even the smallest gripes could become a stick to beat your brand with.

Digest this with my bitter sweet offering of Gajar Methi, a North Indian winter favourite of sauteed carrots and fresh fenugreek leaves.
Read More

Happy New Year everyone. This year I had the dubious pleasure of partying stone sober until the wee hours of the morning while everyone drank too much and imploded like cheap Christmas tree lights. Now I back at work with post holiday blues. Don’t you just love ‘em?

In my years of moping around following the festive season, I now have a tried and tested formula for surviving the dreaded New Year return. I:

• Blew my entire January salary in the winter sales
• Pencilled a party on Saturday to celebrate my birthday
• Booked a week long holiday to recover

Of course, no post-Christmas period would be complete without lashings of guilt at having consumed more food than the average farmyard pig. So  I am also keeping a close eye on what I eat, upping intake of veggies and limiting chocolates to a sensible quantity.

The first Indian recipe of the year was a healthy treat from the South of India – Avial. This coconut-steeped steamed vegetable curry was light, refreshing and the perfect way for me to use up the remaining carrots and potatoes in my complimentary box of organic vegetables from Abel & Cole.

The best thing about Avial is the coconut in it. My usual trick is to by frozen grated coconut at Oriental supermarkets. But I also buy fresh coconut when they’re in season. As I had neither I used unsweetened dessicated coconut, which worked remarkably well!

Coconut isn’t the most low fat of ingredients. But I did away with coconut oil, whole fat yogurt and steamed all veggies in my recipe making it far more healthy. And there is a whole list of other vegetables you can use.

A positive start to the New Year methinks. Hope yours is filled with good things!
Read More

I know I said no more dinner parties. But rules are meant to be broken. Three separate groups of four each don’t one big dinner party make. And feeding hungry students in December is more Christmas charity less entertaining.

So I invited my sister and her three closest mates over for dinner. That’s two three Bengali girls and one Punjabi boy, who is a recent convert to quick Indian cooking. None had eaten since end of November in anticipation of the feast.

I was set to impress with the trendy-but-domestic sister act. I cooked all the food in advance. Popped it into pyrex glass dishes ready to reheat the oven. The table was laid. The man taught me how to spin itunes to provide choons for the evening.

It was all going swimmingly. I couldn’t get itunes to work initially. When I finally worked it out, I set it on non-stop party playlist. A safe choice. What could go wrong? Ne-Yo. Tick. Mika. Tick. Beyonce. Tick.

And then Pump up the Jam. That’s 1989! I jumped out of my chair and lunged towards the imac. Just in time to prevent Madonna from breaking into a 1983 rendition of Holiday.

Pride in tatters, I turned to the food. We ate Kosha Mangsho, Cholar dal, Beguni with Kumro Chokka, a deceptively simple sweet and spicy pumpkin stir fry with little black chick peas. It’s cooked with a classic Bengali five spice mix called Panch Phoron.

I chose pumpkin because they are so in season. They cook in a jiffy. And I’m also sick of pumpkin soup. Luckily for my cool credentials, they also turned out to be the biggest hit of the evening.
Read More

The festive season has started with a bang. Not one to do things by halves, I went to two parties on Saturday night.

The first was a spookily quiet house party. The second, an Irish birthday bash at a new Covent Garden cocktail lounge.

I thawed in the living room at the first stop. Teeth chattering from the big Arctic freeze outside. And then I got involved in a slagging match over a male friend’s hideously-inappropriate party attire of ski boots.

He defended his patch: They’re manly.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Try stepping out in freezing weather in a lace off-the-shoulder dress in the style of Victoria Beckham, silver kitten heels and no socks. Now that’s balls!

And off I went to the madness of central London. This time in a cab to protect the block of ice that once served me well as toes.

To celebrate the start of the jolly season, I cooked a lavish vegetarian main dish that knocks the socks off a plain ingredient. This is Bandh Gobhi Massallam, a whole cabbage smothered in a nutty curry and baked until tender.

Moist, creamy and utterly divine, this party accessory won’t draw any undesired attention.
Read More