Curry cheating

Many Indian cookbooks are mostly about Indian home cooking. The food is nice, but it’s not what you encounter in Indian restaurants here.

However, some years ago I bought a most astonishing cookbook: The Curry Secret.

It’s a small paperback without any photos, but is teaches you how to do Indian restaurant cooking at home.

The trick is to make a basic curry sauce (which you can make in huge amounts and freeze in practical amounts) and to precook the meat (which again can be frozen).

When you then want to cook a nice curry, you just fry some of the basic sauce with some precooked meat and/or vegetables, and you add the relevant spices.

For instance, today I cooked both a dopiaza and a korma in less than half an hour. This was possible because I had made the basic sauce and the meat over the weekend.

Both the curries were lovely and very different – you couldn’t tell they were derived than the same sauce!