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We built blogging tools into Forkd pretty much right from the start. Jared, one of the two main brains behind the idea, is a heavy food blogger and he (quite rightly) didn’t want to have to type his recipes in twice. Indeed, the ultimate target was to provide a single central repository for your recipes from which you could publish to multiple places (a la Flickr for photos or Youtube for video).

Sadly very few people so far have used the facility. No great surprise, I guess, in that few of our users as yet are bloggers and that it takes quite an investment and some experimentation to get a nice layout. We’ve done our best to produce microformat-like HTML for the recipe that we post to the blog, but you’ve got to style it regardless.

Still, as one of the people that built it and as both a blogger and keen cook, I thought it about time to actually use the tools myself. I’ve got approximately 20 original recipes on there now; variations on recipes from a wide range of blogs and books. Here is my current favourite:

Chicken Vindaloo

Hot, sharp, genuinely interesting; this isn’t as hot as its British curry house counterpart. Instead this is based on more traditional recipes (primarily this one at Aayi’s recipes). Worth noting that, whatever we may have been led to believe, the aloo in vindaloo doesn’t mean potatoes. Instead it means garlic (explanation at Wikipedia). The use of caramelised onions in the marinade make this a truly unusual but extraordinarily tasty dish.

Preparation time

30m

Cooking time

20m

Difficulty

2

Serves

2

Ingredients

• 2 skinless chicken breasts
• 1 medium onion
• 3 tbsp groundnut oil
• 1″ thumb ginger
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• ½ tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds (optional)
• ¾ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 3 birds eye chillis
• 1 tomato
• 25g fresh coriander (small bunch)
• 125 ml water

Preparation

Chop the chicken breasts into roughly 1 to 2″ cubes

Peel and roughly chop the onion. Get 2 tablespoons of the oil good and hot in a frying pan over a high heat and fry the onions until they go properly brown. They provide the unusual colour and flavour; you are looking to almost burn them they should be that brown. Once they are browned drain them of any excess oil and put them to one side.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger. Roughly chop the chillis (seeds and all) and the tomato. Put the caramelised onions, garlic, ginger, chillis, tomato, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds (you can leave these out if you can’t find them), salt and red wine vinegar in a blender and whizz them up until you have a thick but smooth paste.

Put the diced chicken in a non-metallic bowl and thoroughly coat it in the paste. Leave it for a minimum of 30 minutes (and upto 4 hours).

When you’re ready to cook get the remainder of the oil hot over a medium heat in a wide pan. Put the chicken and all the marinade in the pan and stir fry for a few minutes.

Add enough water to make a thick gravy and turn the heat right down. Leave to cook for approximately 15 minutes.

Finally, finely chop the fresh coriander and put it in the pan. Turn the heat up fiercely for another 1 or two minutes to drive off any excess liquid and wilt the coriander leaves and then serve.

That’s what you want to hear.  Curry helps combat Alzheimer’s.  This explains my amazing intellectual clarity every Saturday around 11pm.  And there was me thinking it was the beer.

I love Indian Food. Which British male does not, I wonder? Really weird ones, I reckon. Anyway. Like most men in their mid-thirties I have recently realised that I am a phenomenal cook. Who knew? My piece de resistance is indian food. Not only do I pillage at will from Madhur Jaffrey’s excellent Curry Bible but I’ve strayed as far afield as Floyd’s India (try the vindaloo recipe – once) and Hansa’s Gujarati Cookbook (some of the finest vegetarian food you will ever taste).

While Floyd is pragmatically English in his choice of ingredients both Madhur and Hansa use a huge variety of names for the ingredients, many of which are only available from Indian supermarkets (which we don’t have in York, because we don’t look beyond the city walls, thank you /very/ much). It is with this in mind that the Cook’s Thesaurus is absolutely invaluable. It means that you can actually find out what it is that you’re supposed to be buying, and what you can substitute it for if you can’t find it…

Today’s ingredient? From the fabulous Sailu’s Kitchen blog – JAGGERY.

jaggery Pronunciation: JAG-uh-ree

Notes: This is a tan, unrefined sugar that is common in India. It’s made from the sap of palm trees or sugar cane and is much more flavorful than granulated sugar. It’s often sold in solid cakes, but it should crumble when you squeeze it. Look for it in Indian markets.

Substitutes: Mix 1 C dark brown sugar + 2 teaspoons molasses OR palm sugar OR piloncillo OR brown sugar OR maple sugar OR date sugar