Halloumi Curry
Posted at 12:47pm on Sunday, February 6th, 2011 by AndyA really tasty curry – the garam massala and cinnamon balance the heat of the chillis and the richness of the tomatoes nicely, while the Halloumi gives an interesting alternative to meat.
This is a simplification of the Halloumi Curry recipe on The Superflux blog (thanks to Anne for pointing me to it!)
- Preparation time
- 15m
- Cooking time
- 45m
- Difficulty
- 2
- Serves
- 2
- 2 small onions
- 3 cloves of garlic
- 1 inch thumb of ginger
- 1 tsp mustard seeds
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 2 birds eye chillis
- 4 cloves
- 1 bayleaf
- 1 cinnamon stick
- ¾ tsp salt
- 2 fresh tomatoes
- small bunch (approx. 15g) of fresh coriander
- 1 can whole tomatoes
- 1 ½ tsp garam massala
- ¼ tsp turmeric
- 1 ½ tsp ground coriander
- 150g pack of Halloumi cheese
Peel and finely chop the onions. Peel and grate the ginger and the garlic. Finely chop the chillis (seeds in or out, depending on your heat preference).
Get the oil good and hot over a medium flame in an oven proof dish (casserole dish preferably). Once it’s up to temperature put the mustard and cumin seeds in. As soon as the mustard seeds start to pop put the chopped chillis, the cloves, the cinnamon stick, the bay leaf and the onions, garlic, ginger and salt in the pan. Give it a good stir over a high heat for a moment or two, before turning the heat down and cooking gently until the onions go soft and translucent (which should take a little over 5 minutes). You’ll need to give it a little stir every now and again as they cook.
While you’re waiting, finely chop the tomatoes and the fresh coriander. When the onions have softened turn the heat up a little and put the chopped tomatoes and the chopped coriander in. Give it a good stir and cook the tomatoes down for another couple of minutes. Once the tomatoes have broken down nicely add the can of tomatoes. Bring it up to the boil quickly, before reducing the heat to a simmer. Now add the ground coriander, the turmeric and the garam massala.
Leave it to simmer uncovered on a low heat for about 30 minutes. You’re aiming to thicken it, but not to the point of it catching on the bottom of the pan. If it looks too thick you can always add some water. It will depend on the amount of juice in your can of tomatoes. Once you’re done pull out the cinnamon stick and the bay leaf (and the cloves if you can find them!).
At this point you can leave it to cool for later, or move straight on to the next step.
About 15 minutes before you’re ready to eat, reheat the sauce and, once it’s bubbling nicely, chop the Halloumi into cubes and add it to the pan.
When the cheese feels soft it’s ready. This should be in about 12 to 15 minutes.
Serve with Cabbage Sabzi if you’re feeling virtuous or Ginger and Pepper rice and some Naan if you fancy a full on blow out.
The perfect white bread for a Panasonic breadmaker
Posted at 7:43pm on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 by AndyBreadmakers seem to have personalities; I’m on my third machine (each from a different manufacturer) and each one has needed its own set of recipes. This recipe makes a perfect white loaf in my Panasonic SD-253. All measurements refer to the cup and spoon provided with the machine.
- Preparation time
- 5m
- Cooking time
- 6h
- Difficulty
- 1
- Serves
- 10
- 24 fluid ounces of strong white flour (I highly recommend Doves)
- 1 tsp dried yeast (again, I use Doves)
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 tsp white sugar
- 1 tbsp semi-skimmed milk powder
- ½ tsp vitamin C powder
- 2 tsp groundnut oil
- 350ml water
Put the yeast and the sugar in the pan of the machine. Then the flour, followed by the salt, milk powder and vitamin C. Next put in the oil, before finally putting in the water.
Put the pan in the machine and select the ‘French Bread’ program. Press start, and wait 6 hours for lovely fluffy white bread. To get a good crust you really need to take it out of the pan as soon as possible after it’s ready, so try and catch it within 5 minutes of the beep.
My general experience is that the stronger the flour the better the results. I’ve tried a few different makes and the only one that gives consistently good loaves is Dove Farms Strong White Bread Flour. If you keep getting flat or malformed loaves try changing brand of flour, increasing the water by up to 20ml, increasing the sugar by up to a teaspoon or reducing the salt by 1/4 teaspoon.
Can’t believe what I’ve just seen
Posted at 9:46pm on Monday, August 18th, 2008 by Andy
Beetroot
Posted at 10:00pm on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 by Andy
Yet more recipes for things from the garden. This time some early beetroot, turned in to some rather tasty beetroot and feta soup.
Sautéed Glut of Radishes
Posted at 2:22pm on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 by AndyHere it is then. I had to try something with them all
Sautéed Glut of Radishes
So. You got overenthusiastic when you sowed the first radish seed of the spring and now you’ve got a glut. What do you do with them apart from slice them into salads? There are very few recipes for cooking radishes, but Francois pointed me at the Pimp my Radish thread at Ask Metafilter, where I found this one. I particularly like the use of both the radish and the tops. Radish tops taste a whole lot like spinach, by the way. This makes a light summer lunch or an interesting side (use where you usually might use a spinach dish)
- Preparation time
- 5m
- Cooking time
- 15m
- Difficulty
- 1
- Serves
- 2
- 2 bunches radishes (12 large to 20 small per bunch); they have to have their tops still intact
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- Sea salt
Top and tail the radishes and cut them into large chunks. Remove the stalks from the radish tops and wash the resulting leaves in a salad spinner (or similar). Peel and finely chop the garlic.
Get the olive oil good and hot in a wide frying pan. Put in the chopped garlic and fry lightly for a moment or two, before throwing in the chopped radishes. Stir fry for a couple of minutes before putting in the leaves.
Keep stirring until the leaves have cooked down and then serve, sprinkled with the sea salt.
Blogging from Forkd
Posted at 9:16am on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 by AndyWe 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
- 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
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.
Forkd in the Guardian
Posted at 4:57pm on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 by AndyForkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog. And a stumping great picture of me. Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).
Veteran
Posted at 10:23am on Friday, March 14th, 2008 by AndyI am an Internet veteran. That is all.
Do you like to Fork?
Posted at 3:35pm on Monday, March 10th, 2008 by Andy
Well then. We’re there. After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations. Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, WordPress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more. We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.
We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month. If you’ve not signed up, please do. And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.
More forkd
Posted at 11:51am on Monday, January 21st, 2008 by AndyForkd is coming on leaps and bounds (possibly because I haven’t touched the code for months now….). There’s been another release today (this is Feta 3 now) which adds loads of cool features:
- Blog integration
- No need for Flickr
- Easier to find other people
If you haven’t already got an account please shout; we’re going to open up invites to the public soon, and surely you want to be in on the ground floor?
