A day in the kitchen

preparing for an Indian style meal tomorrow night. We prefer spicy food to be made the day before eating and its good to do much of the work ahead of time. I love the process of making a paste, followed by the sauce and the therapeutic fine chopping of chillies, ginger and garlic - coriander is now included in the dish above. A few hours of preparation before getting down to cooking beef for one dish and chicken in a coconut sauce for the second main; it's not often I do this but today I made time. Samosas are a favourite and I use a recipe from Madhur Jaffreys from her early days on television, the page is messy which says it all. So that's the old recipe and the new comes from a visit to the Kinloch Hotel last week when attending the workshop with chef Tully, onion bhajis. He added salmon but I liked the basic mix of onions, fennel, poopy and sesame seeds bound together in a batter. I will follow his recipe other than the fish and make the same small size that he did, the size of a large walnut. Later this morning when tidying up I thought the above might make a colourful blip. The top dish is a concentrated paste, to the right a sauce using the paste as a base and the colourful dish on the left is the chopped ginger, garlic, chilli and coriander.