Yes. Yes I do. More frequently than this blog would lead you to believe, actually. But the Mrs gets so excited about her creations that we’ll let that go.
Curry is what I cook. As much of it as I can fit in a pan. Then I see if I can fit it all in my belly. And I usually can. Sometimes I have to lie still for an hour or so afterwards and not let anyone touch me, but it still feels like a win. As a youth I spent a happy 6 months in Northern India teaching English, a 6 months I spent falling in love with the people, the food, and a borrowed cream and white Royal Enfield Bullet 500. Fifteen years on, and I still feel the same. No-one since has built a motorcycle like it, and I was pretty overjoyed to recently discover a company in England that still imports the genuine, Indian-made Enfields. Discussions are on-going in the Crumble house. But back to the food. Indian food can be a controversial topic, and it seems the culinary world is full of people who will gleefully tell you that, in India, there’s no such thing as “curry”, and that what your local Indian restaurant sells you is nothing like “real” Indian food. In a sense, these people are right, but do we really care? Well I don’t. Fine, a visit to the Kashmiri Palace down the road doesn’t perfectly recreate the chickpea dal I used to get at the little roadside shack near where I stayed, just outside Dehra Dun, but to say it’s any less authentic than food of any other nationality is kind of banal and pointless. Indian food, like any other, has a diversity that’s only been broadened by the migration around the world of people from the subcontinent, and the cuisine’s picked up little bits and pieces from here and there and changed and evolved on the way. What I’m getting at is that I’m going to tell you about the curry I made tonight, and I don’t want anyone telling me it’s not a proper curry, or it’s not a real Indian curry or whatever. 90% of the dishes I ate in India were more or less improvised by the people cooking them, and that’s how I like to cook Indian food.
So we were up in Ballater today on an unrelated matter, and we popped into the butchers to pick up some sausages for the smallest Crumble child’s tea. While there, we decided to get a pound of diced lamb shoulder and see what we could come up with. We got home around half twelve, and I got to work straight away. That pretty much always pays off with lamb. Long and low. First I heated up a dry frying pan, and threw in about a heaped teaspoon each of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, mustard seeds and the black seeds you find when you crack open a green cardamom pod. I toasted these for a few minutes until they’d started to colour a bit, then ground them to a fine powder in a mortar and pestle. I don’t always do this, but every time I do I think “I should always do this”. Besides, all the proper telly chefs tell you to toast your spices, and they do this kind of thing for a living. Next, I sliced a couple of onions into half-rings and fried them in a splash of sunflower oil on a medium heat for ages until they were a quite brown, but not yet crispy. Just short of burger vanions. I scooped them out and set them aside before browning the lamb on all sides on quite a high heat, and then chucking in a whole sliced red chilli, two mashed garlic cloves and about a teaspoon of grated ginger. This got a good stir round, then the toasty spice powder was added for a bit before the whole lot, onions included, went into a casserole dish on the lowest heat possible with just enough hot water to nearly cover. At this point I threw in two black cardamom pods too. These are much bigger than the more common green ones, and are dry and shrived looking. If you see them in a shop, buy them. The smokey pungent flavour they give is unbelievable. I put the lid on and let it simmer gently all afternoon. All day in a slow cooker would do the same job, or a few hours in the oven set at 100. You need to keep an eye on the water because you don’t want it going dry. At the end, you want the lamb all soft and falling to bits, and the liquid like a thick gravy and not all boiled away. Plain basmati rice (1 cup rice, 2 and a half cups water, bring to the boil, turn down to medium-low for 12 minutes uncovered, leave off the heat and covered for another 10 minutes), a big scoop of lime pickle and a cold beer. Authentic? Doubtful. Indian? Absolutely. Delicious? Well, Mrs Crumble went and scraped the pan out afterwards.
Mrs Crumble cooks 