About—plus cooking tips!
All the recipes you’ll find on this website are vegetarian. Most of the curries are vegan too and I’ve provided vegan alternatives for the ones that do use dairy. The recipes are all gluten-free, save for the breads.
If you’re keen on cooking up curries, the most important thing for you to learn is the Tarka, a base usually made up of tomatoes and spices in either oil, ghee or butter. Once you’ve gotten a hang of the tarka, you’ll be able to master most curries!
My cooking is based on ancestral Punjabi recipes with some Gujarati influence due to a a high Gujarati population in Kenya where I was brought up as a youngster. Some of the methods may seem a little time-consuming for this day and age, although fresh ingredients and slow cooking make everything so much more delicious. That said, here are some handy shortcuts:
Tinned pulses and beans (kidney beans, haricot beans, chickpeas) - avoids having to sort dry beans, soak and pressure cook.
Tinned tomatoes - saves on skinning and chopping fresh tomatoes although I still prefer fresh tomatoes.
You can use frozen green beans and frozen spinach for dishes including the Fine Green Bean and Potato curry or Saag Paneer and Saag Aloo.
While tinned beans and pulses can be huge timesavers, I would refrain from using tinned or frozen vegetables for most dry curries (i.e. curries that have very little or no liquid in them). The vegetables in these curries need to retain their crispness, especially if they have a natural high water content, like cauliflower (in the Aloo Gobi curry, for instance). Otherwise, you might be left with one big mush!
A few cooking suggestions:
The recipes’ timings are based on a 10-year old induction hob. Heat given off by different hobs can vary substantially, so the timings I provide are a guide only.
If you include dairy in your diet, I suggest you use ghee (clarified butter) for making dhals and any spinach dishes (such as Saag Paneer, Saag Aloo) as this gives them a creamier flavour.
It is preferable to use vegetable oil for ‘dry’ curries such as Fine Green Beans and Potato, Aloo Gobi etc as the vegetables need to remain fairly crisp.
All ‘spoon’ measurements are level spoonfuls.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, ideas or would like to request a recipe. I’ll be adding more of my own recipes regularly but am always in the market to learn new ones!
