We had our Curryfest yesterday with six friends.
Food went down well from their perspective but it became a bit of a rush with other things going on in the background so a few errors crept in.
We decided on starters from the Dishoom cookbook so we planned kebabs and samosas. Disaster 1. I cooked the filling for the samosas but forgot to get the pastry wrappers out of the freezer so we now have samosa filling in the freezer for another day.
We did serve paneer, chicken and lamb kebabs. Disaster 2. I didn’t have time to make the chapatis so used frozen ones cooked straight out of the freezer. OK but not as good as homemade.
Main courses
Dishoom Chicken Ruby. All prepped the day before so I heated the butter sauce, dropped in the pre prepared tikkas. A success.
Cafe Spice Dhansak. This was prepped a few weeks ago and had sat in the freezer. One of the guests was vegetarian so I put the koftas in the sauce with the mutton rather than combine it with the rice. Disaster 3. I forgot to prepare the crispy onions and the mint in the garden was not at its best, so the rice missed some essential garnishes.
Meera Sodha Pig Cheek Vindaloo. Prepped earlier in the week so it just needed warming through, the hit of the meal.
Anjum Anand Bangladeshi Fish Curry. Again, I had prepped the sauce the day before so as it was warming through I quickly fried the sea bream cutlets, a minute each side before placing in the sauce for a couple of minutes and then serving.
Side dishes were
Oven Roasted Aloo Gobi by Mallika Basu. Prepped early in the morning so it went into a 180C oven for 40 minutes. Easy win.
Anjum Anand Edgy Peas. A very quick and simple side dish that I cooked as the wife was taking the other dishes to the table on the patio.
Afghan Salad. Mrs T63 made that particular dish so I can’t claim any credit there.
A selection of shop bought chutneys and pickles .
Mrs T63 made the dessert. It was an Anjum Anand take on a Scottish (by origin) Cranachan. We had the dogs out very early yesterday morning to pick the blackberries for the dish, as a result my forearms are still stinging from being stung by nettles, then scratched and punctured by thorns. Mrs T63 was quite specific, big plump shiny blackberries, they are apparently the first fruits of the season and are the sweetest, they are also buggers to retrieve as all the low lying fruit had been picked by others. The smaller blackberries that ripen afterwards are “not as good”. That told me.
Apart from trying the tikkas/kebabs for starters I couldn’t eat anything else. I believe it is called Christmas Dinner Syndrome. When you have cooked and tasted so much that you lose your appetite.
Biggest Disaster. I was shattered and failed to take a single photo.
Edit: Almost forgot, we served up two types of Dhal. The black house dhal from Dishoom and Mrs Balbir Singh’s Kabuli Channa. Both were well received from vegetarians and carnivores alike.
