Summer sunshine. Warm patio slabs under foot. Norah Jones playing softly. Spritzers with ice and lemon. The warm tingle of eating bread soaked in the chilli oil from a dish of home-cooked gambas pil pil. Dry white wine and long draughts of cool water. The secret Sunday smile that comes with waking without the help of the alarm or children. The smell of bedside tea whilst watching dust motes in the morning sun. Kids jumping in and out of a too-small paddling pool, soaking each other with squirty turtles. For-once-perfectly-cooked chicken and sausages straight from the barbeque grill. Snoozing and reading under a shady umbrella. Rich malty beer rather than weak lager. Cheese on crackers with scorching lime pickle. Reading Elizabeth David munching handed-down-over-years-secret-family-recipe salami, fresh from Positano, care of a friend's hand luggage. Deep red wine, neither thin nor fruity. Best weekend for a very long time.
There cannot be many folk out there who can claim to know someone with the a name like Mungo Two Sheds Toadfoot. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I can, for he is a regular poster to the aforementioned Usenet group concerning Indian food. In a selfless and humanitarian move to assist those who are 'home-economically-challenged', Two Sheds has launched an online service to bring the treasures of Indian food to tables of the spiceless masses. Curry Kits are, if you will, the culinary equivalent of fine Swedish self-assembly furniture, in that they allow folk to create flavoursome dishes at home without any prior knowledge of Indian cooking. The measuring-out and combination of the various ground spices, whole spices and dry ingredients is done for them. Each kit comes with a step-by-step recipe which tells you exactly when to add your spices, and a checklist of the other ingredients which you will need in order to make the dish.
The key benefit of the 'ingredient plus instruction' format is avoiding the most common pitfall of Indian cookery - unbalanced spicing. Contrary to popular belief, spicing is less about heat and more about flavour. Simply adding curry powder and chillis to chicken or vegetables doesn't make the dish Indian. Subtlety and timing are the name of the game - for instance, the late addition of garam masala to a dish can greatly enhance it but, if you add it too early, the cooking process will destroy the oils that give the flavour and this can introduce a sour note to a dish.
Don't take my word for it, try them. With kits priced from £1, you can get a week's worth of kits mailed to you for under a tenner. With most of the other raw ingredients already residing in your fridge and cupboards, it is a lot cheaper than ordering a take-away and definitely more fun
For all sorts of reasons, I haven't been lurking in my usual online haunts much recently. Which is why it was great to spend some time in the uk.food drink.indian (web version) usenet group this morning.
As I posted a quick message about my favourite Indian and Afghan favourites like chicken hariyali and Burani Kadu-E-Chucha, the lovely smell of ghee, onions and spices wafted through the window from my neighbour's kitchen and started my taste buds tingling. I'm off to marinate some chicken to grill later!