Disaster!

My cooker's broken! Bought a new one but it's going to take a week and a half to arrive. Boooooo.

Tonight's dinner consisted of sausages cooked on one of those health grills and chips from the chippy. Ironic, don't you think?

Any suggestions on what I can make over the next week with a health grill, microwave and toaster would be very much appreciated!  Might have to get creative myself - if anything decent comes out of it I'll post it on here...

Dinner party-tastic!

I like entertaining. It gives me chance to cook for loads of people and I relish the challenge.  But what I don’t want is to cook something so complex that I can’t enjoy the main point of the evening; to have a laugh with my mates.

So just before Christmas, I invited some of my old school friends round and set out working out what I would cook.  There were ten of us so I wanted to do something that could be prepared for a lot of people in one go.  So what better I thought, than a curry!

I’d recently treated myself a new book by Madhur Jaffrey, called ‘Curry Easy’. And here’s the plus – it’s brilliant. You know how some curry recipes require something insane like 20 or 30 ingredients and you have to make a special trip to the shops to get half of them?  Well this book doesn’t do that.  It does exactly what it says on the tin, and I haven’t had a bad curry yet. Curry Easy is one of those books you just need.

I’m not going to give you the recipes for everything I made, but there is one dish in particular that I think everyone should try. Even those that claim to dislike curry will thoroughly enjoy this.And it beats anything from a takeaway. So here goes…

Chicken and Spinach Curry

Serves 6 (I doubled it for the dinner party and it worked perfectly)

6 chicken legs, separated into drumsticks and thighs, or any other chicken parts you like (about 1.9kg in total)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 medium onions, peeled and coarsely chopped

5cm/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

6 medium cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 tbsp sweet red paprika

½ tsp cayenne pepper

5 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil

2 x 5cm/2 inch cinnamon sticks

8 cardamom pods

285g spinach, chopped (defrosted and drained if frozen)

- Spread the chicken out in a single layer and sprinkle 1 tsp salt and lots of black pepper on all sides.

- Put the onion, ginger, garlic, paprika and cayenne pepper into a food processor and, using a fast start-and-stop method, chop all of the ingredients as fine as possible, stopping short of making a puree.

- Put the oil into a wide, heavy pan and set over a medium-high heat.  When hot, put in the cinnamon and cardamom. Let them sizzle for a few seconds. Now put in as much of the chicken as will fit easily in a single layer and brown on all sides. Transfer to a bowl, leaving the whole spices behind. Brown all of the chicken in this way and keep in the bowl.

- Put the onion mixture into the pan, reducing the heat to medium. Stir and fry for 4 – 5 minutes, until most of the liquid has evaporated. Add the spinach and ½ tsp salt. Stir and fry for another 4 – 5 minutes.

- Add the chicken, ¼ tsp salt and 120ml/4 fl oz water. Bring to the boil. Cover, lower the heat and gently simmer for 25 minutes, gently turning the chicken pieces a few times. Excess fat may be removed before serving.