Recipe Challenge - Book #9

Sunday, 14 June 2020

I really love this indian recipe book. It's got lovely pictures and the recipes are divided into regions and it's all vegetarian.  I love it so much that I browse it for new recipes all the time. Then I make the same old curries that I always do - from other sources entirely.

So this was a good chance to force myself to finally try some things from this book. For family dinner (horay family dinner is back!), I made the black lentil dal, and the patak paneer.  

And they were fine I guess but I remembered why I don't really cook from this book ever. Firstly the curries seem pretty mild - I like pretty spicy curries and I often double the spices that recipes suggest.  Secondly there's a heavy reliance on cream in lots of these recipes. Cream in curries is yummy but it's not really a very healthy way to go, and I feel it's kind of unnecessary addition.  The feedback around the family dinner table was mixed - Clare immediately thought they were inferior to my regular recipes, while Mum and Dani seemed to like them a lot.  I don't think I'll be going back to them but I'm keeping the book anyway as I like the pictures of indian life that feature within it.

In other news it was nice to have family dinner back at our house for the first time in months.  Absolutely everyone was there, the only bummer was that Dad came down with a bad case of car sickness on the way down to our house, so he had to lie down for the duration of dinner.   It was nice to have Miley for the first time in in a long time as he normally is working on Sunday nights now.

For dessert we had birthday cake for Jamie's 12th birthday:

It was delicious and a bit of a relief as the last time I made a mud cake in our oven it managed to be burnt and raw at the same time, so I'm glad it was successful this time.