Saturday's curry

You might have noticed that it's been a bit quiet on the slack lasagne front recently. That's for two reasons:

1. We've been on holiday – to France. We ate out a lot, and self constructed meals consisted mainly of bread and cheese and a bit of salad.

2. Other than being on holiday I've been eating a lot of jacket potatoes. These have mostly been consumed with cottage cheese, beans and cheese, or tinned sardines; as you can appreciate there's little blog material there.

On return from our holiday we ordered a big top-up from an online retailer. This was mainly successful but resulted in an extreme over supply of mushrooms. I had selected two packs of the cheapest own brand fresh mushrooms and one pack of dried mushrooms. The delivery driver informed me that the mushrooms had been substituted with premium own brand fresh mushrooms and even showed me what I was now getting. I was initially delighted as this appeared to be a £1 bonus in the mushroom stakes for us. However on further unpacking it transpired that we had been sent the premium fresh mushrooms instead of the dried mushrooms and I was now in possession of 4 punnets of fresh mushrooms.

Now I like mushrooms (and apparently they are very nutritious), but I was going to have my work cut out to use all these up before they turned into a horrible slimy mess. The first punnet (cheap ones) went into a sausage casserole. I hadn't planned to make a sausage casserole because I was catering for a visiting German friend. She's not a typical German so I thought that she might not want sausages. But she did (they were veggie sausages though which I think might be a blasphemy to many Germans), and this was a great use of 350g mushrooms. The next punnet (posh ones) were the main feature of a risotto. Half of the next punnet (posh ones) went onto a pizza (courtesy of Matt, my husband). Which left us with half a punnet of posh mushrooms and a whole punnet of cheap ones. Having eaten mushrooms for 4 days consecutively I wasn't particularly fancying more, but they had to be used or I would risk the slimy mess.

The solution would be curry. I love mushrooms in a curry. The usual would be mushroom,sweet potato and chickpea but I was going to try something slightly different: mushroom, sweet potato and vegetarian “chicken style” pieces. (I don't usually go for meat replacement options much (apart from the mince which I think is fab) but had a few lapses into carnivorism in France (they can just about cater for vegetarians these days but not yet pregnant vegetarians) and since then have found myself fancying that sort of “meaty” taste.)

As usual I started by sweating off a couple of onions (although I heard on the TV that they don't always use onions in India because it displeases the Gods). Usually one onion might do but one of these onions was slightly old and had a slight pickled aroma about it until I peeled off a good few layers and the other had that weird thing where you get a second layer of onion skin a few layers in. At the same time I also added a good lot of fresh ginger that I had finely chopped (maybe about an inch off the piece of ginger root) and a tablespoon of special curry powder. Sometimes I make up my own spice mixture but we have recently replenished with a fantastic product called “Magic Mix”. This is a big pot of a blend of spices which we discovered at a market in Cornwall a few years ago, where we had a taster and met the lady who runs the company. Since then it's become almost as much of a staple beside our hob as a pot of vegetable stock powder. It has no chilli or ginger in it so you add those (and anything else you fancy) to taste.

Next I added chopped sweet potato. Sometimes I chop it big but today I chopped it small. That cooked for as long as it took me to prepare the mushrooms. The remainder of the posh punnet (they were already going slimy) and half of a cheap punnet (still in perfect nick – and they have the same expiry as the posh ones). I added them to the pan along with the “chicken style” pieces. I was a bit concerned as I could smell burning but on closer inspection this turned out to be some grime on the hob ring rather than anything bad happening in my cooking. Once that had cooked down a bit (usually signified by juice release from the mushrooms) I would usually add a tin or two of chopped tomatoes. Today this would be impossible because the pan was already at capacity. So I just added enough boiling water to cover the contents – essential to ensure adequate cooking of the potato – along with a spoonful of branded yeast extract and then left it on a low heat while I got on with other things.

The problem with adding water is that it ended up a bit too liquidy so after a while (once the potato seemed soft) I chucked in a handful of lentils, mainly for the purpose of thickening but with the added benefit of protein and fibre, and left it on a low heat again. Unfortunately I forgot to turn the hob off when we went out for a swim, we could take a gamble and leave it but this would risk a horrible mush on our return. Fortunately Matt was in a chivalrous mood and dropped me off at the pool while he headed back to rescue the dinner. (He joined me about after about a quarter of an hour and as I'm a bit slow at the moment we did the same number of lengths.)

Upon our return it was already time to think about eating (it's the season for my favourite TV dancing programme so I didn't want to be faffing about in the kitchen while that was on). To me it didn't look like we had much rice left (Matt was cooking the rice) so I got it in my head that we should have something else to go with the curry. I had a quick look at recipes for typical “Indian” breads and decided that chapatis were significantly more achievable than naan in the available time. Even then it would be cutting it fine and I would have to take some short cuts, this was risky as I had never made chapatis before but at least I had nothing to compare them against.

So I mixed 115g wholemeal plain flour with 90ml lukewarm water (in which I dissolved a pinch of salt) and then kneaded. I skipped the “resting” phase and went straight to the forming phase – rolling out to 4 very thin discs (I rolled some cumin seeds into two of them). Then I cooked them in a hot frying pan (no oil required) until they started to get bubbles in them.

It was all ready in the nick of time (and it was a treat of Saturday night dancing). The curry itself was rich and spicy, possibly better for the absence of tomatoes. In the absence of chilli I “hotted” mine up with some lime pickle and we both enjoyed some mango chutney and some of our brother-in-law's delicious home made runner bean chutney. The chapatis were a great success – I can't believe I've never made them before.

Wednesday's gratin

We had ended up with another high veg situation in the fridge. This included:

• Courgettes – bargain in the shop the other day.
• Mushrooms – seemed like a good idea at the time but I haven't had a chance to use them yet and they were almost getting to that horrible slimy stage.
• Spinach – I have no recollection of acquiring this. On questioning Matt said he picked this up some time ago when I was away and he didn't think there was enough green stuff in the house. On further questioning he didn't have any particular plan for it.
• Broccoli – because broccoli is really good.

We were talking about what we might have for tea whilst in the changing rooms at the swimming pool. But in terms of other useful ingredients we were somewhat depleted. When I say other useful ingredients I mean cheese – the last 60g having gone into some scones at the weekend. We did have some branded cheese triangles but these have limited culinary application. I suggested that with a bit of cheese I could do anything. Fortunately Matt had to take a trip out to the sorting office so was able to tag on a trip to the shop.

In the meantime I got on with cutting up the courgettes. I still had no idea what I was going to cook. A pasta dish would have been the obvious choice but I didn't really fancy pasta.

I put the courgettes in a large oven proof dish (I actually chopped up more courgette than needed to line the bottom of the dish – the rest will keep in the fridge for another day).

And then in a moment of inspiration decided to cook some sort of gratin. This not only provided the potential to use a lot of the vegetables but also:

• sour cream – purchased as a bargain at the same time as the mushrooms and surely not going to last in a healthy manner much longer
• bread crumbs – finally a use for the vast quantity we have in the freezer following the purchase some months ago of some extremely cut price sliced bread.

The question mark remaining over the meal now was protein. It would be quite acceptable to have some fish fingers or veggie sausages on the side but I didn't really fancy that. I decided to integrate some butter beans into the gratin. We have lots of tins of beans and pulses in our cupboards, most commonly they go in casseroles or curries and I was rather excited about using them for something different.

I narrowly avoided making a significant omission. Fortunately Matt called to ask if we needed onions. We didn't, but this did remind me to chop an onion up and put that in. I used a red onion, which I have subsequently learnt contain more quercetin than other types of onion (although how scientific this fact is I'm not sure and what the benefit of quercetin is I'm not sure). And for good measure I added some cloves of garlic too.

By the time I had layered up all the veggies (and beans and sour cream, intermittently adorned with black pepper and herbs from the new herb grinder that Matt's mum had brought us back from her holiday), Matt returned with the cheese. I grated a generous amount and mixed it up with the bread crumbs (and some more black pepper) and then poured this over the top of everything else.

I had no idea what temperature to cook this at, so I went for the default of 180ºC. I had no idea how long it would take, but long enough at least that I could hang up pretty much our whole household's worth of underwear and socks. I decided it was done after about an hour when it the top was starting to look a bit crispy (I love crispy things) and then put the broccoli on (I decided that would be better as a side than in the main dish).

I was a bit worried that it would be a bit soggy (I had poured over just a little bit of hot stock before it went in the oven) so got bowls out just in case. But it held together remarkably well. It tasted great, although I'm not sure what the sour cream added, but then I don't know what it would have been like without the sour cream. Maybe it would even have benefited from more sour cream. I had cooked vastly more than was needed to feed the two of us – probably more like enough for 6. So we both had some for lunch today (leaving it in a lunch box in a hot car is actually a rather effective (and free) re-heating method) and there's some more for picnic tomorrow.