If you read my article, Curry \u2013 A Journey, published on the Curry page of this site, you\u2019ll know that my first experiences of the dish were of the generic variety which the British invariably cooked and ate when living abroad a few decades ago.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll also know that I then discovered \u201creal\u201d Indian cookery and decided that as I couldn\u2019t afford to eat out that much, I needed to learn how to cook the stuff myself.<\/p>\n
My first stop then was a local bookshop, where the choice of books on Indian cookery was somewhat limited. However, I struck luckily and discovered a book called Indian Cookery by Madhur Jaffrey \u2013 what a find. Written in simple language but with lovely descriptive text and recommendations on what to serve with what, it was just what I had been looking for.<\/p>\n
There was a stumbling block, however, which was the endless list of spices, seasonings and flavourings in the front of the book.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know where to start \u2013 I\u2019d heard of quite a lot of them, having watched a few TV programmes on Indian cooking but, \u201chelp\u201d I thought, \u201cbuying that many all at once is going to cost a fortune\u201d. If you\u2019re thinking the same, don\u2019t panic. Check-in your store cupboard. You probably already have some of the items you will need.<\/p>\n
For example, look for black peppercorns, bay leaves, chilli powder (if you\u2019re already a fan of chilli con Carne), ground ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon if you bake cakes or apple pies. Maybe you\u2019ll find mustard seeds if you do your pickling and sesame seeds if you make rolls or cook Chinese food.<\/p>\n
That only leaves a few basic ingredients which appear in a lot of Indian recipes \u2013 cumin, coriander, turmeric and cardamom. Often you need ground cumin and coriander but if you buy the whole spices, you can grind them as necessary (and they keep longer that way too).<\/p>\n
The other thing I did was to choose a fairly simple recipe to start with and I just bought the spices I needed for that.<\/p>\n
The next time I want to cook an Indian meal, I chose another recipe with similar ingredients so I had to just buy a couple more things.<\/p>\n
Soon enough I built up a whole store cupboard of the things I needed and it didn\u2019t have such a drastic effect on my wallet.<\/p>\n
Then there was no stopping me \u2013 I even know some recipes by heart now and you can do the same if you want to.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t need special equipment for Indian cookery, although I wouldn\u2019t be without my electric coffee grinder (to grind spices) and it\u2019s nice (but not necessary) to have the traditional dishes to serve your meal in.<\/p>\n
Other than that, you need a bit of patience and it\u2019s fun to cook with a friend so that you can share the chopping and grinding or have someone read the recipe out to you step by step so you don\u2019t go wrong in the middle.<\/p>\n
The flavours are great, and a curry evening is sociable, so go on, give it a try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you read my article, Curry \u2013 A Journey, published on the Curry page of this site, you\u2019ll know that my first experiences of the dish were of the generic variety which the British invariably cooked and ate when living abroad a few decades ago. You\u2019ll also know that I then discovered \u201creal\u201d Indian cookery\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[1073,1242,549,1243,1244,1245],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","tag-cook","tag-cookery","tag-dont","tag-indian","tag-needed","tag-spices"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w1.affwebsites.com\/articledir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}