You might have noticed that recently I’ve been trying to increase the numbers of curries in my cooking repetoire.

I find Indian cuisine the hardest to experiment with. Maybe it’s because I don’t have an intuition for the spice flavours, but I find that I need the guidance of a cookbook. It’s a little bit frustrating because this cuisine is one of my favourites.

Hopefully, if I keep on trying, I’ll get better at this. I’ve already discovered that my book at home, ‘Indian Home Cookery,’ is a little bit lacking. You often need to treble, or in some cases, quadruple the spice quantities. Either that or I’m losing all my tastebuds.

For example, the vindaloo recipe in this book gave me a good idea of which spices to use but needed a lot of changes. For a start, it didn’t have any potatoes. Now, maybe someone will correct me, but I’m quite sure vindaloo means “with vinegar and potato”. Also the recipe needed  a minor adjustment for the fact that I didn’t want to cook my sirloin steak for an hour.  Then of course there was the obligatory quadrupling of the spices.

Honestly, the person with the blandest palate in the world would find the book’s curries underspiced! Fortunately I’ve learned how to scale up the quantities successfully!

I had my beef vindaloo with some garlic lentils and spinach. Don’t worry about the rice in the background. It was a bit of a presentation experiment gone wrong. All you need to know is that it was flavoured with caraway seed and turmeric. Here is the full beef vindaloo recipe