What drew me to the recipe, was how differently it’s made to other curries I’ve made in the past. I’ve made other curries consisting of a base ‘gravy’, but generally the meat tends to be browned and/or marinated first. In this, you just add it to the sauce uncooked and cook very slowly. I’ve never encountered the spinach puree either.

Ingredients

Serves 2

• 4 oz Ghee (I made an alternative by clarifying butter and adding Bay Leaves)
• 2 medium Onions, chopped
• 1/2 ” Ginger, peeled
• 3 Garlic cloves
• 400 g Chopped Tomatoes
• 1 lb Diced Lamb (leg or shoulder)
• 2 tsp Paprika
• 2 tsp Tumeric
• 2 tsp Cumin
• 2 tsp Chillli Powder
• 6 oz Fresh Spinach
• Fresh Green Chillies (up to you)
• 1/2 tsp Garam Masala

Method

Cook the Chopped Onions with the Ghee/Butter for about 20 minutes, until well cooked, but not burnt.

When their cooked, blend the Ginger, Garlic and Onions into a smooth paste. Add the Chopped Tomatoes and blend again. Add a touch of water if necessary. You should have a mixture slightly thicker than Tomato soup.

Return to the pan and add the Diced Lamb, add some salt. Leave to simmer for 30 minutes.

Wash the Fresh Spinach. Add 3/4 of it to a pan to wilt, the water from washing the Spinach should be enough to cook it. It always amazes me how it shrinks to nothing.

Blend the cooked Spinach into a puree.

After the 30 minutes, the colour of the curry will have changed a lot. Less tomato soup, more curry. Add the Paprika, Tumeric, Cumin and Chilli Powder and cook for another 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it and add water if needed.

If you have Fresh Chillies, make a puree from them with a dash of water. I didn’t have any so I soaked a chopped dried one. After 20 minutes add the Spinach Puree, Chilli Puree (to taste), remaining Fresh Spinach, Garam Masala and Salt and Pepper and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Mr Stein suggested serving with Basmati Rice cooked with Cinnamon and Cardamom. I opted for Naans this time round.

Verdict

The Karachi Restaurant and Mr Stein are definitely on to a winner here. The slow cooking makes it so rich, yet without over-doing the meat. Unfortunately, since Jenny was away and she’s trying to be veggie, I had to eat it all myself.

First I thought about  the boundaries of the ingredients themselves – Leeks don’t vary that much that I know of. Cheese provides a lot of room to manoeuvre with. Eggs encompass many different types and a variety of cooked forms, I’m not that familiar with their tastes so I was slightly reluctant to experiment. On a side note, that reminds me of Andrew Zimmern’s show with Balut (don’t look if you’re squeamish about food!).

I eventually settled upon trying to recreate an egg curry we had for breakfast in on the backwaters in Kerala, with some stuffed leek and paneer kulchas. I might need to explain myself: Curry for breakfast? Yep, it’s not like British-style curry though – far easier on the taste buds. Egg in curry? You might not get it in that many Indian restaurants in Britain, it’s fairly common though (I think it’s more of a south Indian thing) – they’re usually hard boiled. What’s paneer? It’s an Indian cheese, although I see it as having a taste and texture closer to tofu. It doesn’t melt either. Kulcha? These are new to me too, they originate from the Punjab and are like small Naan (an Indian bread).

Shopping for ingredients was a little fun, I popped over to the nearest asian area to track down some paneer and curry leaves. I tend to make paneer myself (it’s dead easy), but I wanted to minimise my cooking time. In the shop I visited, I ended up finding some Welsh Paneer! I couldn’t find any curry leaves though so I asked the guy at the till, after which he pulled out a bag from under the till. Maybe it’s the asian equivalent of tofu in Chinese shops? When I got home I was a little bermused by the episode, and unsure if ‘curry leaves’ had another meaning. Looks like curry leaves though, I also noticed he didn’t charge for them!

Ingredients

Kulcha dough

• 5 oz wholemeal flour
• 5 oz plain flour
• 2 oz cottage cheese
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 2 oz butter
• water

Kulcha filling

• 2 small leeks (or 1 large), finely sliced
• 1 green chilli
• 3 oz paneer, grated
• salt

Egg curry

• 4 eggs, hard boiled, shelled
• 1 large onion, sliced into long strips
• 2 1/2 tsp corriander powder
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds
• handful of curry leaves
• 2 tsp tomato puree
• 400 ml coconut milk

Method

1. Start with the dough. Mix all ingredients together until you’ve got a dough. Leave covered at room temperature for 1 hour.
2. Lightly fry the leeks, this will bring out their flavour. Once translucent, take off the heat and mix with other ingredients.
3. The dough will provide 4 kulchas. Divide the mixture into 8ths and mould into circles ~4″ diameter (beer mat size). Top with kulcha stuffing and cover with another piece, pressing edges together and removing any air inside.
4. Slowly cook the kulcha at a low heat in a lightly buttered pan until golden.
5. Mix the corriander powder, tumeric and chilli powder with water into a smooth paste.
6. Dry fry mustard seeds and curry leaves for a minute. Drop a dash of oil and add the onions. When transparent add the tomato puree. Cook for a minute and add the paste from before.
7. Add the eggs for a minute and mix to absorb the colours/flavours. Finally, add the coconut milk, allow to simmer for 10 minutes. 2 minutes before the end add the garam masala.

Verdict

I served it up with half a portion of rice each with the kulchas on the side. The curry was pretty nice but I’ve still got a bit of tweaking before it’s as good as the stuff in Kerala. I might slice the eggs in half to absorb more flavour. The kulchas turned out fairly well too but I think it would have worked better if I’d stuck to my initial idea of stuffed parathas which would have been a bit lighter. A lot of recipes for Indian bread mention using a Tava.

The crab is cooked and served in it’s shell. I’ve tried curries with just crab meat and they don’t work anywhere near as well. It takes a lot of effort to eat, generally you end up spending about 20 minutes extracting the meat before you can get round to finally eating – it’s all part of the fun though. The first time Jenny ate this she got a bit freaked out, she’s not the biggest seafood fan and the crabs looked like giant spiders.

We usually use British crabs which are all from the Cancer Pagurus species. Quite often we have Cromer Crabs which tend to be a little bit sweeter. Other types of crabs will probably work just as well.

Ingredients

These are rough amounts, mum just adds the ingredients by eye:

• 3 crabs
• 3 large onions
• 1 large tin of tomatoes
• 1/3 block of creamed coconut
• Salt
• Chilli powder
• Turmeric
• Garam masala powder
• Paprika
• Ginger
• Garlic

Method

1. Use a small hammer to break the crabs up. Remove all the non-flesh innards. Break into large chunks – walking/swimming legs, carapace (abdomen) and the claw. Crack big sections (but don’t separate) so that the sauce can get in and it can be broken when you get round to eating it.
2. Liquidize the onions. Add a bit of sunflower oil to the saucepan and brown the onions.
3. Once the onions are golden brown add the coconut and fry for a couple of minutes.
4. Add the salt, chilli powder, turmeric, garam masala, paprika, ginger and garlic and fry for another couple of minutes.
5. Add the tomatoes and a little bit of water and let it cook for a few minutes – until it is thick rich gravy.
6. Add the crab and let it cook for about 15 minutes.

Eating

We tend to serve this with Basmati rice. To eat it, you have to use your hands to start with. First you find a walking leg and break that apart. You then use the end of that leg to help extract the meat from the rest of the crab making sure to suck all the juices out of it. We tend to have a graveyard in the centre of the table to put any empty shells. Eventually you’ll end up with a pile of meat which you can mix into the sauce and use cutlery to eat with the rice. If you’ve been slow you might have to re-heat things before tucking in.

The recipe claims to be West African influenced, I found it not too dissimilar from a Thai or Vietnamese curry. There wasn’t much too it but the results were very satisfying. As Jenny will claim I do often swing towards the hotter side of warm when I cook. I ended up making my own curry paste, in the end I found it slightly lacking in chilli.

I really love the photos on her site too, I was too hungry to play around with mine so this one doesn’t look quite as good:

Since we’ve had a fair amount of meat recently I opted for just a veggie version with only potatoes. It’s quite a liquidy curry so I served it in bowls and made some sticky-type rice (which I managed to sneak more sultanas into). It ended up being pretty much spot-on for what I was after – rich, sweet with just the right amount of kick. It probably could have done with slightly more floury potatoes to what we had, to soak up some more of the sauce. I’m sure they’ll be a next time.

Since Jenny was going out for a work curry, I had to make sure I didn’t miss an opportunity for myself. Duck is one of my favourite meats but I’ve seldom had it in a curry. When I had a look around for ideas, I stumbled upon one with a Kerala style which I had to go for given the quality of the food we experienced there on our recent trip of India.

The curry was quite mild for me chilli-wise, but then again I did improvise and was trying out some chillies from the veg box. The spices contrasted well with the duck, bringing out the flavour of the meat rather than masking it. It was served on a bed on lightly fried sliced potatoes which were also coated in the sauce. I made some sultana pilau rice to go with it. I used a light chicken stock, but I’m not sure it worked. The sultanas went well though.