Currying Favour and Favouring Curry

We had a good night on Saturday at the Blog Awards Ireland 2013. For me, it was more than just a chicken dinner. It was the culmination of a year of slaving over a hot stove, slaving over a hot camera and slaving over a hot computer. I was nominated for the Best Food Blog (after a subtle campaign) and I entered one of my recipes for the Glenisk competition. Given that I haven’t won anything since accepting a carton of 200 Benson and Hedges in a rugby club raffle over 30 years ago, I was not anticipating a lot. 

So, I was pretty delighted, amazed and thrilled when I won Best Food Blog AND the Glenisk competition. I had obviously managed to curry favour. How could I give something back? How could I honour the Blog Awards and Glenisk? Curry seemed like a good idea and that’s where my headline comes from. So it is time to favour a Lamb Curry.

I promise to not flaunt the awards in every photo. They are pretty all the same.

My ingredients:

• 1 leg of lamb or 1.5 kilos of lamb chunks
• 3 onions
• 1 cooking apple
• 100 gms of raisins
• 1 small tin of tomato purée
• 750 ml of top quality yoghurt.
• 1 big handful of fresh coriander
• A curry spice mix. I made my own (as you do).

Make your own curry mix once and you will never go back to shop bought.

The mix:

• 2 teaspoons of garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon of white pepper
• 2 teaspoons of mixed peppers
• 6 whole cloves
• 3 teaspoons of cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoon of chili flakes
• 3 teaspoons of cardamom pods
• 3 teaspoons of turmeric (if you are lucky enough to have an international traveling friend, get the dried roots and crush them yourself).
  

  Those turmeric roots are tough as granite. Next time, I’ll use the powder.

Dry fry the cumin seeds until they start to change colour. Pod the cardamom and throw away the shells. Crush the turmeric if you are using dried roots. Then add everything that needs crushing into a mortar and crush with a pestle.

Once crushed and mixed we end up with a nice curry powder.

If you are using a leg of lamb (they are very cheap at the moment and it made sense to do so), de-bone the leg and chop into nice chunks discarding the fat, skin and other bits as you go.

Side note of kitchen caution: If you are deboning a leg of lamb, don’t do it the morning after the night before using a big, very sharp knife. You might do what I did on Sunday….

When you have stemmed the bleeding, pieced your thumb back together and bandaged the appendage, get on with the lamb preparation.

Yes, that is the offending knife. It is very, very sharp.

Put your injured hand into a plastic glove to keep the spice out of the wound and the blood out of the meat. Toss the meat in the spices.

The gloved hand tossing the meat in the spices. Lovely aromas.

Next, fry the meat until nice and brown on all sides.

Fry the meat in batches. Don’t touch the brass handle of the hot pan with your injured hand!

Meanwhile chop the onions into chunks and sweat them off in a casserole dish. Then add the meat.

I love it when a dish starts to come together.

Let the frying pan cool down a little. deglaze the pan with a nice big dollop of yoghurt.

It would be a shame to let all that spice flavour go to waste.

This picks up all the fried spices left in the pan.

It saves on the washing up too.

Add the pan scrapings, the tomato purée and the delicious, organic, tasty yogurt to the casserole.

With those colours, you’d have to take another picture.

Add a small amount of water (or beer), some salt to taste and then throw in the raisins and stir them in.

Ready to go in the oven.

Put it in a 200ºC oven for 45 minutes, adding the apple, sliced, with about 15 minutes left on the clock. Take it out, chop the coriander, and stir it in.

Now that’s what a curry should look like.

Serve this delicious (and not very hot) curry with Basmati rice. Serve it with a nice beer and eat it with a fork, using your good hand.

A daft amount of para-Indian props go into my last shot.

The curry was pretty delicious. It was a fitting celebration meal for having curried the favour of those fine, fine people at Glenisk and Blog Awards Ireland. Thank you all. I greatly appreciate the awards.