And so it begins...

I love a good curry.  It doesn't have to be hot, although I have been known to enjoy a nice hot bhuna at my local curry house.  Heat should not be confused with spice, in my opinion, and a good curry may be spicy without being overly hot.  In fact, too much heat can prevent you from tasting the subtler flavours in the dish.  I like my curries to have depth of flavour, so a mild but thoughtfully prepared korma can please me far more than an apparently more daring, blow-your-head-off curry.  As a non-meat eater, Indian food also carries the appeal of offering a wide array of dishes traditionally intended to be vegetarian, rather than the token gestures and strange combinations that so often appear in that section of the menu.  Lentils in their many different colours, mung beans, chickpeas, cauliflower, aubergine, paneer, okra... all can be made to feel quite at home in a lovely, spicy curry, mopped up with bread or a bowlful of rice.  I'm salivating just typing this.

Now I'm the first to admit, I don't know very much about authentic Indian cuisine.  I haven't had the pleasure of visiting India and my Indian friends always seem far keener on producing Western cuisine when we visit than on educating their white friends on the food their mothers and grandmothers prepared.  And who can blame them - it probably gets rather boring being expected to trot out the same dishes you have always eaten simply because they seem exotic to your guests.  I had a perception that Indian food was complicated to cook, requiring inside knowledge and a vast store cupboard of spices that I may only use once but could only be purchased in industrial-sized bags in the International section of the supermarket.  Consequently I've always shied away from cooking Indian food.  It was great for a night out, but beyond the realms of my kitchen.

My particular part of West London is blessed with a vast number of very good Indian restaurants, covering a variety of regions.  If you can't be bothered to leave your house, many of them deliver to your door and I hadn't really seen the need to overcome my nervousness of cooking a curry for myself.  Until last year, when I fell pregnant.  I had always been partial to a curry but, my pregnant self positively adored them.  I didn't notice at first, and would tell people that I wasn't really having any cravings, until Hubbo pointed out that I had been dragging him to our favourite curry house every weekend for the past 16 weeks and it was really getting rather expensive.  Takeaway was not much cheaper, and with my enthusiasm for spicy food showing no sign of abating, and the prospect of our reduced income looming ever closer, I wondered whether it was time to poke a toe in the curry cooking water (only metaphorically, of course: that would be gross!).  I experimented with various jars and pastes, hoping for an easy solution.  The results were so-so and, with the addition of some chutneys and shop-bought starters and breads, a convivial evening could be had, but it wasn't a patch on our nights out at the curry house.

But once you have a baby, nights out become a rare treat and, having decided not to return to work, even a takeaway is a bit of a luxury.  So I have been hunting for a cookbook that offers an easy introduction into this cuisine and I think I have found it:  Anjum's New Indian by Anjum Anand.  This book is a tie-in with the BBC series 'Indian Food Made Easy', which, once I saw the book, I could vaguely remember having watched with Hubby and made "ooh, maybe we could do that" noises about before getting distracted witha ll the many other things there are to do in life.  As I stood in the bookshop (yes, I'm that old-fashioned - I still think getting your hands on the actual book is the best way to work out if you want to buy and/or read it), I read the introduction, I read the tips about getting started, I leafed through a few of the recipes.  It didn't seem to involve as much planning, nor as many ingredients, as I had thought.  In fact, many of the ingredients were things I already kept in the house.  Perhaps I could do this after all.

I started with Tarka Dal (p176), a wonderful, buttery lentil curry which was a dream to make.  It made the house smell delicious, it froze well (a boon in the early post-baby days) and the most complicated part about making it was hunting down Bengal gram, and even that turned out to be quite easy once I braved the local Indian supermarket (who were incredibly welcoming and helpful).  I could put it together during the day whenever I got a few spare moments while the baby napped and then reheat it when we were ready to eat - leaving it to sit only added to the flavour and texture - plop a spoonful of ghee in just before serving to waken everything back up.  Yum.  The only problem was, Tarka Dal was so good, and proved so popular with both Hubby and I, that I have been making a batch of it each month for almost a year but have never quite got around to trying anything else from the book...  Oops!

So tonight, I'm flipping forward a page (There, you see, it isn't that hard and you don't even have to go very far from your favourite recipes to try something new if you don't want to!) and trying out the Easy Mung Lentil Curry.  The clue is hopefully in the name.  Anjum says "[t]his is a simple but utterly delicious lentil curry that is often served in the homes of Sindhis, a group of people who hail from the northern region of Sindh, which is now part of Pakistan.  However, this wholesome, homely dish could almost hail from any community.  It is easy to make and appeals to all.  It is a loose curry, so serve it with some plain basmati rice on the side."  So that is what I shall do...