Simple, Comforting, Versatile and Surprisingly Healthy Curry

I lived in Sri Lanka for a few months in 2010 and I grew to  love cooking curries with coconut oil.  It is much lighter and tastier than ghee.  I was pleased with how the roasted butternut squash curry I made recently  turned out, but my all-time favourite curry is this one.  It’s not really a traditional Sri Lankan dish, exactly, and it isn’t like the kinds of dahls you get in Indian restaurants here, as it is creamier and richer.

It is very easy to make, keeps beautifully for a few days in the fridge, freezes very well, and can be used in number of ways.  It’s got a comforting, creamy texture, but is light and easily digestible. If you want something to comfort you when you’ve got a cold or are cooking for someone elderly or with a delicate digestion, or making puree for a baby, it’s an excellent dinner.  I like it with lots of chili, but  without chili it will appeal to anyone who likes korma or pasander  style curries.   It has a similar creamy sweetness but is much lower in calories and much higher in fibre, so will feed a take-away craving for someone who is trying to shrink (or is skint).

I made some on Saturday, ate some of the leftovers for supper and scoffed the remains for breakfast, whilst marveling at the unlikely sunshine (I can take reasonable photos of stuff in the garden):

Ingredients: Red lentils, onions, red peppers, coconut oil (you can use sunflower  or rapeseed oil if you can’t get coconut) creamed coconut, garlic, turmeric, whole cumin, ground coriander, bayleaf,  a stock cube, fresh coriander, fresh ginger, fresh or dried chili. Plus – if you can get them – fresh or dried curry (methi)  leaves and dried flaked garlic.  It really doesn’t matter if you can’t though. 

Put about a third of a kilo  of  red lentils in a saucepan with cold water, the bayleaf, a heaped tsp each of turmeric and coriander, the stock cube (veg, chicken or fish, depending on your eating habits and what you are going to add to the basic curry) and grated  ginger (I had a chunk about the size of my thumb and didn’t peel it) and about half of a standard packet of creamed coconut. You can just crumble the coconut straight in and stir it as it melts, you don’t need to mix it as per the instructions on the packet. You can add fresh grated coconut instead  if you like.  If you are using dried chili flakes or powder add as much as you are inclined to now, plus the dried garlic and dried or fresh methi if you have it.Let it simmer away until the lentils have swollen and collapsed and it’s all gone lovely and thick and gloopy. This should take about fifteen to twenty mins and you might need to add more water. It’s about two thirds of the way  there in the photo below.

Meanwhile, toast the cumin in a frying pan.  This really deepens and softens the flavour. Then add some coconut oil.  When it’s melted, add  two roughly chopped  brown onions and a two or three roughly chopped or torn peppers and the chilis if you are using fresh ones. Red or orange or yellow are best as their sweetness works well, but green will be just fine, too.   Crush, chop or grate the garlic and add that, too.  Fry the mixture gently until the onions and peppers are softened.

If the onion mixture is done first, just take it off the heat for a bit.  Once both are done, combine them, stir in the fresh coriander and enjoy.    This works as a main with rice or naan or rothi, or as a side to other curries or grilled meat or fish, or with other proteins added directly to it, especially chunks of leftover roast chicken or lamb.     On Saturday I added a couple of handfuls of dried shrinp to the lentils as they were cooking, and  served it with some cod fillets that were yellow- stickered to less than half their original price in the Tickenham Waitrose.  I marinated them with lime juice and dessicated coconut, then fried them in coconut oil and topped them with zested lime and toasted dried coconut.

This was nice enough, and the Idiot Boy really liked it, but my preferred way of making this is the first of the variants below.

Smoked Mackerel and Coconut Lentil Curry Don’t bother with the coconut oil.  Instead, flake the meat off the skin of some smoked mackerel fillets and fry it briefly to release some of the oils.  You can chuck the skins in with the lentils for added fishy deliciousness and scoop them out before you serve it.  Cook the onions, peppers etc in the mackerelly oil and follow the recipe above, adding the mackerel into the lentils when you combine everything.   It is gorgeously smokey and sweet.  If you want to make a deluxe version for a dinner party, add some king prawns to the mackerel curry. It can be made in advance and reheated.

Coconut Lentil  Curry Sauce for  Barbecues or Bonfires  Make the lentil curry as directed above, but when it’s done, remove the bayleaves and blitz it with a handblender.   This should be served warm or room temperature.   It can be made a couple of days in advance or frozen for longer storage, but will become very thick if it is too cold; it needs to warm up a bit to be sauceable.  If you have made it too thick for your liking you can thin it out a bit with coconut milk or yoghurt.  Serve it  with lamb, pork, salmon kebabs on flatbreads with salad and lime or lemon juice, or in big, puffy pittas.

Kedgeree for Breakfast? If you cook the plain or fishy version of this, and have it and some rice leftover,  in the morning you can mix them together, fry it up and call it kedgeree.  It makes a gorgeous accompaniment to a  green chili and onion thin omelette, or some squashed tofu and onion if you are a vegan.

One Phallic Squash and Some Roasted Vegetables

You never know, this might be my last truly dismal photo, as I now have a posh new smartphone with squillions of gigapixels.  The above does look pleasingly like a Fanny Craddock era cookery book illustration, though; possibly one of those ones where you don’t know if you are supposed to eat what is pictured or use it as a facepack.

What is actually above is a blurry representation of  some more ‘joined up’ dinners.I wish I knew how to do one of those outline drawings of the picture above with numbers so I could easily itemise them with a list.   The fish are probably fairly easy to identify, really. These are a couple of the sea-bream from the eight one can buy for a tenner from the Bangladeshi (?) fishmonger in Hounslow.  The preparation for these five meals took about 90 minutes tops, excluding the time the stuff was in the oven.  The chick peas were ones I cooked and froze before.  I didn’t watch the Jamie Oliver 30 minute meal series, but got the impression they were distinctly separate start-to-finish meals.  I think this method – of one big splurge for a sequence of days or a couple of days now and a couple in the freezer is less effort and cheaper. It was cooking like this, with less elaborate stuff – e.g basic mince and onion mixture turned into cottage pie, lasagne, spag bol and stuffed peppers – that I taught to the young mums I mentioned in the previous post.  It was lovely to see their sense of achievement when they had knocked up four tasty, wholesome, cheap meals in a couple of hours.

Cooking ahead like is also a good way to accommodate a family with different dietary requirements, as pretty much all the dishes could be rendered meat or dairy-free.  Even if you live on your own, cooking like this is an effective way to be kind to your futuree self, so you’ve got lots of nice different, dinners coming up.

Chicken and Butternut Squash Curry 

The basis of this set of meals was a large butternut squash and some onions, peppers and carrots that needed using up.  I cut up the phallic end and chopped it and hollowed the testicular end out.   The chopped schlong was tossed with cumin, turmeric, garam masala, coconut oil, ground coriander, dried fenugreek leaves, a couple of small onions –  chopped – and a whole head of garlic, and roasted in the oven.  I  roasted them in the pyrex bowl they are pictured in, above, loosely covered with foil.  This is partly because the Idiot Boy and I seem to have broken all our lidded casserole dishes, and partly because I wanted a deep but narrow dish for this to keep it moist.

When this was cooked and cooled I blitzed it with the hand blender.  Half of it was mixed with some fresh chili and coriander, some spinach that needed using up and a load of leftover chicken and eaten with naan bread. You could add beef or prawns or cumin roasted beets or paneer or anything to this high fibre, low GI, low fat curry base, or up the creaminess with yoghurt or creme fraiche. It was very good  and I will definitely make more quick curries this way when I’ve got other stuff in the oven.

Butternut Squash Curry Dip with Limey King Prawns and Crudites

We had the other half of the mixture cold (well, room temperature) blended a bit smoother with two heaped tablespoons of full fat Greek yoghurt, chopped coriander and dried flaked chili.   This was scoffed as TV dinner with a mound of crudites, grilled king prawns that had been marinated in a little lime juice, and some toasted whole wheat pita .   It would make a lovely picnic or buffet dip. With the spicing altered a bit, it would make a good baby food, too.

Baked Sea Bream with Chick Pea and Roasted Veg Mash 

In the oven at the same time was a large flat roasting pan with a load of small red onions, three orange peppers, half a red pepper, a few  large tomatoes that were getting a bit wrinkly, some similarly exhausted carrots and  another head of garlic.   These were roasted open with sunflower oil.  I seldom use olive oil for cooking.  The health benefits are reduced at high temperatures and it’s too expensive.  I use groundnut when I want things to be crunchy, coconut if the taste is appropriate and sunflower the rest of the time.   When it was done I reserved about a fifth on its own.  Then I  mashed up somewhat more than a third of the remainder – shown in the orange bowl above – with chick peas so that there was a high veg to chick pea ratio. We had this heated up in the microwave and served as a mash with the baked, lemony-herby sea bream and some green beans.

Butternut Squash stuffed with Roasted Veg, Chick Pea and Chorizo

This mash – another third or so –  had a lower roasted veg to chick pea ratio and I didn’t mash the mixture up too much, I added some crisply cooked chorizo, chopped fresh coriander and smoked paprika to it, stuffed into the butternut squash bollock, topped it with some grated edam and parmesan (I think; it could have been cheddar or gruyere, not edam as we are always plentifully blessed with cheese here). The cheese functions as a lid, stopping the stuffing from drying out. That sinister dark blotch is a bayleaf I stuck in it for largely decorative purposes.  This was lovely baked –  covered with foil for 30 minutes in a medium oven, then ten mins uncovered to brown the top off –  and split down the middle so we had half each with a mound of salad.

Squid Stuffed with Chick Pea, Shrimp and Chorizo with Spicy Tomato and Pepper Sauce

The remainder of the roast veg and chick pea mix was mashed quite smooth and had chopped parsley and a little less of the chorizo added to it.  Remember the fifth or so of the roasted veg I reserved?  This was blitzed with a tin of  chopped tomatoes, smoked paprika, regular paprika, an unfinished glass of white wine from the night before (NB you can get tiny plastic storage boxes eight for quid in the pound shop and freeze wine that has been abandoned in this way) and simmered with a handful of dried shrimp and a bayleaf.  I then extracted the dried shrimps,  added them to the mash mix and stuffed it into the squid.   Waitrose sell frozen packs of squid tubes for under four quid for £3.75 for four or five and quite often have the fresh ones reduced for quick sale toward the end of the day.   These are in the plastic box above, because they went into the freezer. They cook, defrosted, in a medium oven in about 25 mins.  The trick with stopping squid from being rubbery is to cook it covered with fluid like this, or in a stew or to fry or grill it very quickly.  It’s half the price of chicken breasts and pretty much solid, fatless protein.

I quite often do stuffed squid in a similar sauce as a dinner party dish which can be handily prepped the day before.  If I am doing a fancy version, I stuff it with more seafood – king prawns, white fish, herbs and sun-dried toms,perhaps – for pesky pescivores (who are like vegetarians, but more expensive to feed) or some sort of sausagemeat and more chorizo for omnivores.  You could also stuff this mixture, minus the chorizo and shrimp into peppers for a meat-free meal.

A Week of Joined Up Dinners

This post was supposed to have a picture for every meal, but my camera skills are so poor, and my kitchen so dark, that the sequence of images of dubious smears of slop would have been very off-putting.

I owe much of the way I plan meals to my mother.  She was a working class eastender who  was attended a  malnutrition clinic as a child, raised her oldest  children during rationing and her youngest on benefits. These experiences left her with a siege mentality towards food which I have definitely inherited.    My cupboards and freezer are always full, my garden is full of herbs and I NEVER waste food.

My mother never traveled any further than Wales but would drag me all over London to source exotic ingredients she had read about or ones that were simply cheap.   We would get up early so that she could go to Covent Garden when the (original) market was closing, and non-trade punters could pick up whole crates of stuff for, quite literally in the seventies, pennies.   If the glut we got was fruit, I was happy.   I had a child’s naturally sweet tooth, and a week of compote, crumble, pie, jelly and meringue – or a month of jam – would be a delight.  If it was veg, we had to eat our way through a succession of very different and inventive meals with one principal ingredient; often tomatoes, sometimes peppers or courgettes, and, on one painfully memorable occasion, swedes. I defy Heston Blumethal to make a week of swedes inspiring.

I learnt a great deal about from my mother.  Not practical cooking skills, for she never actively taught me to cook, and I never cooked a single meal – not so much as beans on toast – while we lived under the same roof.  The kitchen was her domain and she wouldn’t let anyone else in it. Rather I learnt her philosophy of food, much of it derived from an interest in nutrition that bordered on the obsessional,  and an arsenal of household management, shopping and menu-planning skills.  There was also food lore and foraging.  I trust myself to pick quite a few wild mushrooms, and delighted a friend by identifying a walnut tree on a recent foraging expedition.  Possibly one of my favourite culinary exercises is to be in someone else and to rustle up a meal with whatever ingredients they have.  I am always ready to steadily cook.

To cook cheaply and efficiently, I learned that you never start with a list, apart from everyday basics that might need replenishing. You examine the shops to see what is discounted or cheap and combine it with what you have that needs using up.    I learned that if you had the oven on, you had to put at least two things on it and if something was simmering, something else could probably be steamed over it.   I’m on a tight-ish budget now –  nowhere near as tight as one I was brought up on – and I plan meals the way the meals I ate as a child were planned.   This is what we ate over the last week.

Friday:  Salmon fillets baked in the oven with olive oil and parsley, topped with pan fried scallops and crisp chorizo. This was our most luxurious dinner of the week, but not perhaps our best one.  The salmon was from the wild Alaskan frozen fillets that Tesco almost always have ‘half price’ at a fiver for six or so small, shrink-wrapped portions.  It is the best I can afford and is  pink and firm, not flabby and orange.  The scallops were marked down twice in Tesco so I picked up eight largish-ish ones for under two quid.   I fried the chorizo (Tesco’s ‘finest’ on special offer at two quid  and vastly inferior to the Lidl one I usually buy) till crisp and set it aside and then gently fried the scallops in the pan juices from it.   With this we had some roast red onions and peppers,  and some butternut squash that was dusted with smoked paprika and roasted.  I topped the squash with the dusty tail end of a packet of walnuts that I toasted in a frying pan.   If you were feeding a vegan, this would work as the main event of a meal, if it were souped up a bit.

Saturday:  When the oven was on yesterday I roasted a double quantity of peppers and onions  and two lots of squash.  The second dish of the latter had two strong brown onions, garlic and a tablespoon of garam masala in it.  I never peel butternut squash, incidentally, unless I  am making mash for a dinner party or cooking for someone with dentures.   I never peel anything if I can help it.  I also soaked about a third of a kilo (for ‘weighing’ see ‘peeling’ above) of chick peas overnight.   I simmered them up with a ham stock cube,  a bayleaf and a handful of the dried sliced garlic you get in subcontinental grocers.  I love this stuff; it imparts a rich sweet garlickyness entirely unlike the sour bad-breathiness of puree, granules or other processed garlic products.  I split the chick peas into three portions and froze two of them.  The other portion I turned into a curry with the butternut squash, more garlic and onions and three small green peppers, flavoured with turmeric, ground coriander and cumin and lots of chili and fresh coriander.  It was hearty enough not to need rice so we had with crisp salad and minty, garlicky, yoghurty dressing.  There was enough for another day, so it went into the fridge to await its fate.

Sunday: The Idiot Boy roasted a chicken and some spuds  for lunch.  Then he made a chicken and mushroom risotto for supper.  I made stock for soup for my lunches for the week with chili, lots of veg and the slim pickings off the chicken and some lovely Krakowska sausage from the cheap Polish deli in Hounslow.

Monday: We had the rest of the curry.  Inevitably, it was much more delicious the second time round.

Tuesday:  I made tonight’s dinner on Monday.  I had parsley and coriander that needed using up, and 500gm pack of turkey mince in the freezer.  So I knocked up a dozen large meatballs following broadly the same recipe as the meat one above, but  lots of chopped herbs and more chopped onion as it needs more moisture than beef.  I chilled them in the freezer, baked them in the oven, and froze half  when they were cooled. We had them with a mound of steamed veg with a bit of ripe Camembert stirred through it and a sauce made of the other portion of roast peppers from Friday. These were simmered in a tin of toms with some fried, finely chopped chorizo and smoked paprika.  You need a flavoursome sauce with lean turkey mince.

Wednesday:  This was our third anniversary of living in sin.   It being a school night (for the Idiot Boy) and both us feeling lazy we decided in advance that we would stay in and eat something comforting and treatsome, so I made a pizza.  When the meatballs were cooking on Wednesday night, I roasted five chicken thighs on the other shelf of the oven. These had been marinated in smoked paprika, garlic and a little ground cumin.  The pizza was topped some simple tomato sauce (one tin of toms, poured onto a fried onion and blitzed with a bit of sugar and a handful of fresh herbs and a little sugar), one and half chicken thighs, the last of the chorizo,  green pepper, red onion, pine nuts, mozzarella and parmesan.  It was bloody gorgeous and lovely and light, even though I made it deeper than I would like (he’s deep pan, I’m thin crust, though you’d never know it to look at us).  It even made for a half decent photo.   I made  the pizza dough with 500gms of flour and had enough for a small round loaf  that I flavoured with rosemary from the garden.

Thursday:  The rest of yesterday’s tomato sauce and chicken, plus the rest of the Krakowska, three small peppers in orange, yellow and green and two large onions were combined with dry- fried cumin seeds,  a couple of small red onions, chilis, ground coriander and some black-eyed beans.  I’d soaked the beans the night before, and once again used about a third of a kilo.  I split these into four portions, though, as I seldom use beans without any meat in the way that I use lentils and chick peas.  They marry so very well with  sausage or bacon or ham.  Topped with cheese and fresh coriander, this lightish chili was  hearty and rich enough not need the bread with it, so we will probably scoff that at the weekend.

This week of meals is pretty representative of how and what we eat, with the exception of the pizza, as I only tend to bake bread when we have guests for dinner.  We have scallops and similar luxuries when I get them heavily discounted.

It isn’t markedly different from what my mother would have cooked, though we would have had rice, potatoes or pasta with every meal and commensurately smaller portions of the more expensive meat and veg.  The Idiot Boy makes pastas salads or buys sandwiches for his lunches, and the rest of the time we avoid stodgier starches because our sedentary lifestyles mean we don’t need them.  We don’t need all the cheese and wine we scoff, either, but cheese and wine are far harder to forgo than spaghetti and toast.

My mother wouldn’t have been able to afford fresh salmon or scallops. She would have bought much smaller amounts of chorizo and krakowska as luxuries, to be made the focus of a lunch, not as ingredients to enrich a sequence of dinners and lunches.  She would have used much less chili than I do, and not added a glug of wine to the chili as I did.  I don’t think we ever ate chicken portions, either, or minced turkey.  We only had whole chickens on occasional Sundays (breast of lamb or beef brisket were cheaper, then) and a whole turkey at Christmas.  She would have approved of the fact that I haven’t bought anything processed or thrown any food away this week and that we ate plenty of vegetables with every meal.