52 Recipe Challenge - Week 18.

This week has been a bit of a nippy one so instead of making a sweet recipe I decided to make a savoury one, a nice warming curry!

As well as cooking this week I have been marvelling at the fireworks going off on the building up to bonfire night and on November 5th.

I have also decided to start a new challenge and have a go at NaNoWriMo the novel/ 50,000 words in a month challenge. I used to write a lot and even did a creative writing element to my degree at university but since then I've hardly written and seemed to have fallen out of the habit. So this is my attempt to see if I could write a novel and to kick myself back into the fiction writing habit. Although this will take a chunk of my time up I'm still planning to keep up my blogging at the same time!

So this week I decided to try the Channa Masala recipe that Carly Mountain had published in the same edition of Now Then Magazine my curry recipe was featured in as it looked tasty.

To make this recipe you will need:

1 Onion
A handful of cherry tomatoes
4 Cloves of Garlic
10g Ginger or a few teaspoons of ginger powder
1/2 easpoon Turmeric powder
1/4 teaspoon Chilli powder
8 teaspoons Coriander powder
1/4 Garam Masala
1 Mug of water
1 tin of Chickpeas
1 tin of chopped Tomatoes
2 Sprinkles of curry leaves
1 Tablespoon of oil
1 Sprinkle of Salt

To start this I got out the ingredients I thought I needed and sliced the onion.

Once I had sliced the onion I put that, my garlic and some ginger powder into the food processor to try to make it form a paste.

When I was happy it was paste like I heated some oil in my wok then added the paste and started cooking it.

Before glancing back at the recipe and realising I'd forgotten to add tomatoes. So I turned the heat off the wok and moved the existing paste to once side, chopped some cherry tomatoes in half and threw them in my food processor for a few seconds.  Once they were blitzed up a bit I added the existing paste and mixed them with the tomatoes.

Then I poured it all back into the wok and started to cook it again.

I cooked it over a low heat and added the spices, stirring them in, then slowly added the water.

After the sauce had cooked a little longer I decided to add a tin of chopped tomatoes to it instead of sauteing some tomatoes in another pan them and then adding the gravy to them.  After a few minutes I decided to add the curry leaves, the tin of chick peas and a sprinkle of salt.

As there was a lot of liquid I turned the heat up to reduce the mix a bit, I also changed it by deciding it tasted a bit bitter so I added a sprinkle of sugar to the sauce near the end.  (I didn't add this to the ingredient list as I thought this was a matter of personal taste.)

After about ten fifteen minutes the curry had reduced a bit and we dished it up and served it with onion bahjis and naan breads.

It tasted lovely in the end despite all my fretting about tweeking the recipe but it made loads so we ended up having the other half as part of our lunch the next day!

52 Recipe Challenge - Week 6 Chilli Pork with chickpea mash.

After thinking about the last recipe I made which was lovely and rich but also contained four different types of cheese it seemed a good idea to make something a bit healthier.  This week’s official recipe is adapted from a chilli chicken recipe in a cook book called: Healthy Dishes, it’s been adapted to chilli pork because that’s what was in my freezer.

To make this recipe you need:

4 Pork loin steaks

A glug of olive oil

5 teaspoons of harissa paste

3 Garlic cloves

A tin of Chickpeas

8 tablespoons milk (rough guess)

2 teasoons cumin

2 teaspoons corriander

A pinch of salt and pepper

The first thing I did when making this recipe was to cover the pork with olive oil then cut slits into it and then coated it with harissa paste. 

Then I covered the pork and put it in the fridge to marinate for half an hour.

Whilst I did that I located my tin of chickpeas and pre heated the oven to gas mark 7/ 220c. 

When the meat had finished marinading I put it into a tin and popped it in the oven for about 25 minutes.

After doing that I drained the white wine vinegar off my lazy garlic, added it to some olive oil and then fried it.

As the garlic was frying I drained and rinsed my can of chickpeas then put them in the pan as the garlic started to stick to the bottom.  I gave it all a quick stir before adding the 4 tablespoons of milk the recipe recommended; however, this didn’t seem enough so I poured in another glug of milk and cooked them until I thought they had cooked enough to be mashed.

So when I thought the chickpea mix was cooked I popped them in my blender which whirred for a few seconds then got a bit stuck.  I prodded the mix a bit before realising that it needed more liquid before I could puree it so I added more milk. By the time it had blended into a decent puree the mash had cooled down so I returned it to the pan to heat it up and added the cumin, coriander, salt & pepper to season it.  Once the mash had heated up, the pork had finished cooking so I dished up them up and got eating.

I liked this recipe because I enjoyed the flavours and how it worked as a nice light meal, not the using every pot in the kitchen side of it...