Hello all. How are we?
I am in a flap about the potential demise of twitter (whether tech or idiocy brings it down), as it has been my happy and supportive place for too long and I still feel comparatively isolated from others in real life - people seem to have lost the knack of togetherness on a routine basis. (I am on mastodon https://mastodon.social/@melindahaunton and insta at mhaunton btw.) I am also deeply irritated by so much tech fail in my life (have just had to replace a TV whose sound went and a laptop whose battery stopped taking any charge, in the same week). I intended to be on holiday in Milan last week but a combination of railworks and not feeling great meant I cancelled it when it became difficult to do (in my defence an almost-five-days in Milan would have become at two-and-a-fraction, which rendered the whole thing a bit duff). I went to Bath instead, since that's apparently where I am capable of going in post-covid times. It was nice. I have the heating on, a bit, but I worry about it every time.
In brighter news, the works downstairs are ending (hurrah). And I am going to complete Challenge 2022 - November hasn't been the most innovative of months as I've been away quite a bit, but I have been cooking some Indian and other subcontinental stuff for this month, and I have some Spanish for next, and that is a NYR that has been fun and completed.
As is typical, I take terrible photos, but in my defence I also think it's quite splodgy food. Tasty though. And the day I spent unexpectedly taking a colleague to A&E I had already made the filling for these and the therapeutic twiddling of putting them together for baking was exactly what I needed to work off my referred stress and worry over discovering that ambulances don't actually come when you call any more :-/ Still tasty pea things, mind.
I have deleted some unidentifiable brown lumps pictures. I apparently didn't picture the cherry tomato curry (which is still lovely out of season), nor the marinated paneer tikka and I am left with these:
The Mumbai toastie of joy
Masala eggs (bung a bit of garam in your scramble, mostly)
Garlic pepper butter prawns, which are exactly what they sound like and delicious. Much better than this duff picture.
One from Mezcla that isn't Indian but was so good I don't care: roasted tomatoes with garlic, used to make broth...
...with lots of butter too, and then with white fish poached in it...
These aren't exactly core Indian food, are they? I am doing pav bhaji and lamb and pea korma this week, I promise.
Two new to me that were a bit more inventive both come from Khazania, the cookbook by Saliha Mahmood (won masterchef a while back). She has some influences from other regions than the norm - so these potato and spinach bolaki are classic Afghanistan, apparently. Really easy flatbreads with a mash-and-greens middle (with garlic and herbs too - in fact, so much garlic it was a bit much even for me as it doesn't get much cooking). It did not see the Afghans through to the cricket world cup knockouts (it was topical at that point), but it was worth a try.
Finally, a heroically ugly but interesting (and not typically Indian) set of beef (yes beef) meatballs in onion yoghurt sauce. Northern spices - fennel, ginger, cumin, coriander, cardamom. The meatballs are just beef, onion and those spices. Fried off to give an outside crust then cooked in water for 30 mins or so.
The sauce is most of those spices blended with a lot of crispy fried onions, water and plain yoghurt, gently cooked for 20 mins. It is gloopy, but then again my blender is also dying (ffs ffs EVERYTHING IS BREAKING)
You finish it off by cooking the meatballs in the yoghurt for just a couple of minutes, to make everything look finally repellent. Truly, brown lumps on rice this time. It's not bad, though. And it's always worth trying new things, right?
I say this, as if I am not clinging to old things quite hard. Hey ho. Onwards.
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