Recipe: Fruity curry

My Mum makes an awesome fruity curry, but the rest of my family aren't curry lovers so her version is so mild you can barely taste the curry! I grew up eating it so it has a special place in my heart but since getting together with SBB he's introduced me to 'proper' curries so although it doesn't have quite enough of a kick for me anymore I still crave the combination of fruit and curry.

The list of ingredients is fairly small and it can be whipped up in a relatively short time.

The recipe serves two and is pretty customisable. You could throw in a diced stalk of celery, or a whole apple, dried cranberries instead of sultanas or even a few nuts. When I came to make this the other night I realised I didn't have any apricots (boo!) I did, however, have some cashew nuts so I threw those in instead and it was pretty awesome!

A tip for the apple is to choose the crunchiest one you can - I made the mistake of using a 'softer' one last time I made it and the apple was a little soggy, but then I always prefer my apples crunchy - if you don't, just add whichever apples you like as it won't really effect the recipe.

I usually make this recipe with cooked chicken - sometimes I can pick up a discounted fresh chicken from Co-Op for about £1.50 so I cook it as soon as I get home, strip off the meat and portion it into bags and freeze it to later use in pasta dishes, sandwich fillings and curries.

Ingredients:

• 20g of butter (or a couple of sprays of light oil if you're calorie counting)
• 2 fresh chicken breasts, diced (or 200g cooked chicken, shredded)
• 1 onion, sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 tbsp curry powder
• 1/2 apple, diced
• Small handful of apricots, diced
• 70g sultanas
• 500ml chicken stock
• Salt to taste

 Melt the butter, or heat the oil, in a medium pan over a medium heat. If you're using fresh chicken, add this to the pan and cook until each side has a bit of colour - about 6 minutes.

Add onion and garlic to the pan and saute until translucent - about 6 minutes. If you're using pre-cooked chicken, add it to the pan now and stir in the curry powder. You may need to add a little water to stop the powder sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Add apple, apricots, sultanas (or whatever fruit/nuts you've chosen) and stock. Season with salt if you wish. Simmer for 10 minutes of until the sauce thickens.

I usually serve with 70g (dried weight) of brown rice or over a baked potato.

Do you have a fruity curry recipe? What fruit do you use?

A small obsession with frozen... not the film

SBB has been getting me to try new foods.

After years after declaring hatred for them SBB has encouraged me to try, and I've discovered I enjoy, the following:

• Marmite
• Yellow peppers (still can't stand the reds or greens, though)
• Cauliflower

The last one was a real surprise to me. I really hated it. Really, really. But now I can't understand what the fuss was about.

I've been trying to add more vegetables to our diet and have recently become obsessed with frozen vegetables. I bought a bag of mixed frozen veg a few years ago (which had red pepper in - not a great start!) and we hated it. Perhaps I went too cheap with it? We've always had frozen peas but they were all we had. Obviously I buy fresh vegetables but I want the flexibility of frozen veg.

Anyway I decided to try again and I'm so glad I did. I've been adding it to almost everything lately. Burgers and sweet potatoes with frozen veg? Simple, healthy and tasty!

 

Have you recently discovered a taste for anything you previously didn't like?

When cooking in bulk goes horribly, horribly wrong...

I'm a great fan of cooking in bulk when I can - what's not to love about only having to cook something once and the prospect of a quick tasty meal to be saved for another day?

A while ago I made a large batch of Million Vegetable Mince from my cookbook 'Mince!' by Mitzie Wilson. I've had the book for years and it's where a few of our staple meals are from. Plus quite a few of the recipes lend themselves to cooking large quantities to freeze for later.

I won't go into the recipe but it's essentially blending up tons of veges and adding them to the mince mix to bulk it up and make it go further (it's probably also to disguise the veg if you have a vege-phobe in the family!). I added the mince into pots with a few boiled baby potatoes and had it for lunch for a week. It was lovely but - look away now if you're eating - after tucking into it on the first day I noticed that the mince wasn't as good a quality as I'd thought and there were nuggets of fat and gristly bits. Eurgh.

I soldiered on as it was all I had for lunches but by the end of the week I was feeling a little ill.

A couple of weeks later I decided to make it again but I had the brilliant idea that I could swap the meat for Quorn. I tend to swap cold meats for Quorn slices as the thought of sliced meat gives me the heeby-jeebies sometimes, so I thought that it was a pretty safe bet that I'd like the mince even though I've never had it before.

I'd also had some celeriac mash at the dinner with my family the other week and thought it was quite nice so I decided to make the mince with a celeriac and sweet potato mash. I've also seen a lot of recipes on Pinterest about cauliflower mash. Now, I've never been fond of cauliflower. In fact I've been known to call it the 'Devil's vegetable' because I hate it so much but, as it's been a few years since I 'd last tried it I decided to be try it in the mash - thinking the taste would be disguised by the other vegetables.

I followed the recipe, just adding the Quorn mince instead of 'real' mince and blended the celeriac, sweet potato and cauliflower in a separate bowl after boiling. I tasted a bit of each and they tasted quite nice so I happily dished up the food into pots ready for lunches.

I was quite excited the next day to eat my lunch and was feeling rather pleased with myself...
...That was until I started to eat it.
I managed to choke down two mouthfuls but that was all.

The mince tasted like cardboard and the mash was bland. And it had lumps of cauliflower as A: I don't think I'd cooked it for long enough and B: that meant it didn't blend well.
I threw the rest away.

Now it left me with a problem. I hated the food but the Quorn was more expensive than even the extra lean meat that I could have bought - particularly as I bought two packets. So I was left with food we couldn't eat and I felt too guilty to throw away.

The yellow arrows mark all the pots I had!

In the end I had to admit defeat. I was so disappointed.

How about you guys? Any disasters with cooking experiments?

Latest happenings...

A lone rocking chair squeaks on its rockers. The wind rustles through the trees. In the distance a harmonica can be heard playing, its solitary voice haunting in the empty air...

Okay, okay, it may not be quite like that around our place but essentially we haven't been doing much DIY - at least, not any that's interesting. What I have been doing is cooking.

I love cooking (mainly because I love food!) but I feel safest when following a recipe. Here's a quick peak at what I've been making:

 These brownies are 'diet' brownies from my Cook Yourself Thin Quick and Easy. I bought it a few months ago and so far I've loved every single recipe I've tried. Especially the brownies!

 Technically not cooking but I recently received a granola topper from Graze and had no idea what to do with it. Then I had a bright idea that I could sprinkle it over some frozen vanilla yoghurt. So glad I did - it was awesome.

This low-calorie mac 'n' cheese doesn't look so great as leftovers straight out the fridge but the shape did amuse me. 'One lump or two?' I asked SBB - he wasn't so amused. 

 Granola topped fruit pie - a low calorie version of a crumble. I had a pretty serious craving last week so I dug out the recipe and made this little baby. Mixed with more frozen yoghurt it tastes just like the real thing!

This was my dinner last night - fruity curry over baked potato. I think I'm in love...