Trying something new

Another dreich day, another day dawning with no plans. (Note to self: try to have some objective every day!) But my friend Paddy (Anglican priest, artist and friend), recently returned from a six-week stay in South Africa and Zimbabwe, brought me back a present of a curry kit - not the Indian style of curry with which I am familiar, but a Malasian curry, a Cape Malay Mutton Curry. Not that I think I have ever in my life bought something labelled "mutton" - do people still buy mutton these days? or even talk about it? Anyway, there was a packet with six sections in it, each one full of a measured quantity of spices and seeds and dried leaves, and a recipe (to serve 6, but I just went along with it.) Putting that together actually took up the 90 minutes between coffee and lunchtime, and involved a great deal of chopping: onions, garlic, green pepper, green chilli, ginger, aubergines, potatoes, tomatoes. Then I washed up. I'll let you know tomorrow how it tastes; sufficient for now is the fact that my entire house now smells ... foreign.

The smell and the consistency took me back to my student days, when we discovered a Chinese restaurant for the first time. Himself and I were not long an item when friends with whom we sang (and who were really responsible for our meeting) suggested the four of us go to this small restaurant in Kelvinbridge. I had never eaten so much rice at one sitting, and found the menu bewildering, settling for several visits on the most innocuous-seeming Chicken with Pineapple. Sweet and Sour Chicken seemed to involve chunks of battered, deep-fried chicken, and eventually (we're talking a few years now) I settled for the Chinese curry, which was very ... yellow. I remember thinking my friends pretentious for asking for chopsticks - and now we use them at least once a week at home. Tempora mutantur ...

Apart from that, we had a brief foray to the church, walking up to ensure we were warm enough to survive half an hour without heating, so that we could run through a new communion solo for tomorrow. Makes a change, not doing it at midnight because we'd both forgotten ...

Blipping the stages of making the curry.