Indian Food For Beginners: October Butter Chicken Night

For his 40th birthday, my gift to Badgerman was to host a Curry Night for four, once a month for the next 6 months, cooking everything from scratch using the recipes and fresh spices provided by The Spicery. As I am a complete novice at making Indian food and generally using spices, this was definitely going to be a labour of love and also the perfect foil for a blog series, which I introduced a couple of months ago.

My baptism of fire came in the form of a Tandoori Night in September. Today is the second installment.

I’m really pleased that I have started this journey into using spices with what are considered to be simple classics like tandoori and butter chicken. I don’t know how I would have felt if I had to jump right in with, say, the Lamb Dhansak that’s coming up at the end of November.

A NEW DESIGN

Before I get into the dishes proper, I just have a couple of thoughts about the new design, which was introduced this month.

Instead of a cardboard box, I received a colourful folder made of sturdy plastic designed to contain the recipes and easily fit on a shelf with other cookery books, as well as cunningly double up as recipe holder. I think it’s a very attractive piece of kit.

There is one flaw that is hard to pass by, and that is in the design of the recipe cards themselves. Instead of a rectangle of card, it folds into a ‘V’ shape that you cut to open to access the spices. Unfortunately, I lost a couple of lines of the method at the bottom as they ran into the fold I was supposed to cut so it’s a bit of a mess. Still it looks fab and on the whole works really well.

THE COOKING EXPERIENCE

I really liked this one, and got to cook Butter Chicken, Kachumbar Salad, Gobi Aloo, Pilau Rice and Raita.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a dish called Butter Chicken. I’d never heard of it before and it sounded a bit boring to be honest. Badgerman was equally confused and thought it would be similar to one of the heavier cream-based dishes like korma or passanda.  It turns out that butter chicken is what you do with your leftover tandoori and it’s amazing. There’s butter in it as could be expected, but also yoghurt from the tandoori marinade, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, a little bit of cream thrown in at the end and of course lots of other spices, in particular fenugreek, which I had never tasted before and was really delicious.

And this here is why this experiment is so satisfying to me. In the process of cooking these dishes, I am handling spices I’ve never heard of, let alone cooked with: fenugreek, Kashmiri chilli, amchur, ajowan, nigella seeds… Granted, I didn’t prepare them myself, but at least now I know what they smell like. I also cooked cauliflower for the first time in my adult life, having previously decided that life was too short to ever eat such hideous fare, and it was fine of course. I’ll still only ever eat it in a curry though, or at a push in a cheese sauce made by someone else.

I had a bit of a hairy moment when I realised that the chilli had completely split whilst cooking and I feared that the Gobi Aloo would be way too hot for me but my mouth survived pretty much unscathed.

IN SUMMARY

Badgerman and our two lovely guests (who provided ice cream for dessert, yay!) all loved this curry. This is definitely one I would do again. I also really appreciated the addition of the crunchy salad and raita to cut through the richness of the dish. The Pilau rice was nothing like what I usually make using the basic supermarket spices, and I didn’t ruin it, which is pretty good going considering my track record of turning rice into mush.

We finished everything off with the ice cream, and our guests left happy, which is all you can hope for, isn’t it?

On another note, Date Night anyone?

The Spicery have introduced a new Date Night deal that’s already got me thinking about next year’s Valentine’s dinner. The kit includes the recipes and spices to prepare a three-course meal for two consisting of a starter, main and dessert. Next month is Arabian Night with a mezze starter, marinated lamb with saffron rice and a rosebud and cardamom milk pudding. All I can think is: ‘I want to make that!’. That should warm the heart of their marketing director.

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Indian Food For Beginners – An Experiment

 

 

When it comes to birthdays, some people are really easy to buy for. Some others… are not. And so it is that when Badgerman’s birthday comes around, I have a really hard time finding him a suitable gift. He doesn’t really like birthdays and he never wants anything, or when he does, it’s invariably a £400 electric guitar pedal, and we can’t afford that. I find the whole thing bewildering. I NEVER run out of ideas; there are so many great things out there, be it a kitchen gadget, a piece of jewelry (not diamonds either, anyone for stacking bracelets?), a DVD or an Amazon gift card so I can buy All The Books. And I’m barely scratching the surface of all the awesome things I could want for my birthday.

So imagine my conundrum this year when I had to find a present for his 40th birthday. It is a milestone birth date and I wanted it to be personal and memorable, however I was faced with the reality that it also needed to be, let’s put it bluntly, as cheap as possible, because these are the times we are currently living in as a family. If it ain’t necessary and/or financially reasonable, however much we may feel we ‘deserve it’ and ‘it’s a big birthday’, it would be irresponsible for us to buy it when we are barely solvent at the best of times.

This is when I hit my favourite online gift shop: Not On The High Street. It’s a gathering place for a large number of independent UK companies, their offerings are super quirky and inventive and they cater for all budgets. One of the best things about the website is also how they arrange items by theme, so for Badgerman, I knew I should be able to find something in either the Music or Food sections.

It is whilst browsing through the website that I came across a small company called The Spicery. As per their name, they sell fresh spices and herbs, which you can buy in various size packaging. But they also sell them in a unique way in recipe kits and subscription boxes. All the recipes on the website looked appetizing and I immediately fell in love with the idea of signing Badgerman up for a monthly box.

The boxes come with all the recipes needed to cook a dinner for four from scratch (a main and either sides or a dessert) and all the spices required to create it (including rare spices), weighed to the recipe requirements. I also checked the other ingredients needed and they were all bog-standard staple items which you would be able to find in your local supermarket without problems. There are a number of options to choose from, first between World Kitchen or Friday Night Curry, and then once you’ve settled on one, you can select either the Discovery Box (for the adventurous – Ethiopian Doro Wat?!), The Favourites Box a.k.a the classics (Bhuna Curry Night!) or the Vegetarian option (Mexican Tomato & Pasilla Chilli Tortilla). It was also helpful that the ‘present’ itself came in the form of a voucher to be redeemed online, leaving the decision of which option to go for to the birthday boy!

Badgerman loves Indian food and I wasn’t surprised when he went for the Curry Night option (after much deliberation, I think he wanted everything). He was a regular at his local curry house when he was a university student in Leicester. I, on the other hand, had never had a curry before I moved to England and I am generally not a fan of spicy food. You couldn’t find a couple more at odds in this area. But, hey, not only was it not my birthday I was buying for, but I thought this would be a great challenge for me. Cooking with spices is something I know nothing about and find quite daunting, and I was attracted to the idea of stepping out of my comfort zone to try my hand at something different, especially if the fearsome process of sourcing spices I’ve never heard of was removed from the equation. Plus, I knew Badgerman would love it and we’d get to have a fun dinner party with friends. What’s not to like?

This is an ideal experiment for me and, I hope you’ll agree, also for the blog. I will chronicle my foray into Indian food – I have only made two vaguely Indian recipes using basic curry powder before so I am pretty much a complete novice – and I’ll let you know how I get on, complete with pretty pictures of the end products!

Last week, we received the first box in the post and we have a date booked with friends in a couple of weeks. So for our September experiment, I will be making Tandoori chicken and sides. I can’t wait!

 

 

Note: I paid for this out of my own money and was not asked to write a review at all. All opinions are entirely my own, I just thought it would be a fun and exciting project.