Cook in a Curry

I always strive to cook a meal that is wholesome, delicious and brings out the best flavours in the ingredients. However I’m willing to accept that anything that assists you in making your daily cooking experience a tad bit easier is never a bad thing. When most people think of a ready paste they equate it to the word “instant”. Whereas using ready ingredients as part of your meal to speed up the cooking process does not make it in anyway ‘less authentic’.

Though I am a Pathaks paste virgin – there I’ve said it! I guess this is hugely down to the fact that I grew up as part of a generation in India where there weren’t any posh supermarkets, ready meals or takeaways. But that didn’t steer my mother from giving us freshly made home cooked meals adapting to our surroundings and making the best of all the seasonal vegetables & meats that were in abundance in local markets. An inherent quality that I carry forward with me even today.

With a long standing reputation in the food industry in the UK; the Pathaks brand has evolved and come into its own. Now a day’s using a paste as part of a meal would seem like a quick option especially for those young professionals or busy working families that don’t always have the time to make up the base from scratch. So when the Pathaks team got in touch and asked if I’d like to sample some of their products and work on a recipe using a paste I wanted to make sure it complimented the ingredients in the final dish but also made for a delicious meal that would be part of my repertoire.

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They say when you celebrate to mark an auspicious occasion; something sweet makes it even more special to share in the happiness and also the food. That’s exactly what I will be doing.

A very happy 1st birthday Cook in a Curry! My blog turns one and to say I’m excited, loving the experience whilst sampling delicious food would be an understatement. I love sharing not just my recipes but also experiences and feel fortunate to have a space where I can connect with the world at large. All revelling in the same passion of good food with a keen eye to try something different in their kitchen makes me feel like a vital part of the process.

For those who have been reading the blog posts’ for a while would know that I do have a sweet tooth. So to be honest I couldn’t contain my delight doing a birthday post that encompasses the word – Kesar Ras Malai. A popular milk based dessert with dumplings soaked in thickened milk flavoured with cardamom and saffron. Sounds indulgent? Well that’s exactly what I’m aiming for with this post!

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I have been meaning to get another perspective on Indian cooking for a while now but more importantly feature the same on my blog. And to be honest I couldn’t be more delighted to have Kavey write a guest post for Cook in a Curry. Her blog Kavey Eats has everything you’d want to know about events, restuarants/book reviews, cooking classes and recipes. Make sure to check her blog for my recipe of Green Coconut Prawn Curry. Hope you enjoy her post below & the recipe. Give it a go; its absolutely delicious!

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Cooking Paneer Malai with Kavey

You know how people sometimes talk about second generation immigrants as slightly lost souls – neither entirely comfortable in the land from whence their parents came nor completely integrated into the land of their birth?

Well, that’s not me.

I was born in London in the early seventies to two doctors who emigrated from India a few years before I was born. My sister came along 3 years (and five minutes) later. Throughout our childhood, we were brought up to have a strong connection to our relatives in India – indeed we visited them every few years, which we loved. But we were also brought up as British kids, free to take onboard our local culture, without the stricter cultural and behavioural strictures that many other second generation children were, in my admittedly subjective opinion, shackled with.

That applied to food too – mum regularly cooked Indian food but she also taught herself Italian, French, Chinese and, of course, British dishes from cookery books and by trial and error. We probably had Indian food once or twice a week, if that. And we travelled a lot too, in our holidays, to wonderfully exotic places and mum would often bring home a recipe or two such as peanut soup from South America, something she still makes today.

What all this boils down to is that, whilst we’d often help mum in the kitchen, we never really learned to cook Indian food in any meaningful way –  we didn’t pick up the techniques, the instinctive use of spices and wide repertoire of dishes that we might have resulted from a more traditional upbringing.

(Of course, I think my parents got it absolutely right – I feel a pride in my extra cultural heritage, I am very happy in my brown skin, I will always cherish my links with India. But I am first and foremost British).

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