I recently realised that I’d never tried one of the snack recipes from the great range of Curry Focus recipes.

I’ve been eating cheese on toast for a long time but all I usually do is slap a couple of slices of cheese onto some toast and grill it.

I looked at the Cheese on Toast recipe and it wasn’t that much more complicated, with a minimal number of ingredients and extremely simple cooking directions.

I’m usually a bit peckish when I get home from work and this looked like a great recipe to tide me over until dinnertime.

I arranged for my usual dinner tasters to pop around in the middle of the day so that I could try out the snack recipe.

I had all of the ingredients mixed up in a bowl before they arrived and turned on the grill as soon as I heard the knock on the door.

And within 10 minutes everyone was eating the Cheese on Toast.

This is a really good snack with great onion, tomato, cheese and coriander tastes – nobody could taste the cumin so maybe my pinch was too small. And one serving of the cheese on toast is very filling.

Everyone enjoyed the snack and it received a good taste score of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat/spice rating of “None”.

You should consider this Cheese on Toast recipe the next time you need a good snack – you’ll have a great filler in about 15 minutes.

The British Curry Awards have been held annually since 2005 and has become an established popular event in the culinary curry world.

The 2010 Awards will be made on Sunday 21st November at Grosvenor House in London.

The Awards ceremony features drama and entertainment, as well as great food.

You can nominate your favourite restaurant online or you can download a PDF to print and then fill in and post by snail mail. Whatever option you choose, you’re running out of time.

Just make sure that you get your nomination in on time.

It’s not often you see stories like this but another one has just come to our attention.

A guy in Greece persuaded a friend to pick up his favourite food from an Epsom restaurant and then personally deliver it to him.

Apparently the restaurant often gets request to ship a curry overseas so didn’t bat an eyelid when the food was picked up and taken straightaway to the airport.

It just goes to show that some people will go to great lengths to satisfy their tastebuds.

You can read the full story here.

I’ve been eating chicken patea (or pathia or even patia) for years now, simply because it’s got a great taste - I love the sour bite.

There was a great-looking Chicken Pathia recipe in amongst the range of yummy Curry Focus curry recipes so I decided to give it a try.

All of the usual curry ingredients were in the recipe with the addition of tamarind, lemon juice and tomato paste (or puree).

I already had everything that I needed for the curry, including the chicken, so my weekly shopping trip concentrated on the less exciting things like breakfast cereal, bread and milk.

A quick look at the recipe showed me that it was a straightforward recipe to follow and it would take just over half an hour to cook the curry - and the ingredient preparation wouldn’t take long either.

So I headed into the kitchen about half an hour from the scheduled dining time and got to work.

Nothing disastrous or untoward happened during the curry cooking and the dinner guests arrived just as I put on the rice.

So it wasn’t too long before I served up the Chicken Pathia Curry on basmati rice to the curry testing panel.

And it was great. Lots of tomato and a brilliant sour, lemon taste sitting in the mouth. The chicken was well cooked and the sauce was thickish but not too dry.

The curry received a great taste score of 8.5 out of 10 with a heat/spice rating of “Medium”.

I am more than happy to add this recipe to my list of great curries and I will definitely be making this curry again in the not too distant future.

My girlfriend, who doesn’t like hot curries, is away for a while. She has an aversion to vindaloo because it’s always hot in curry houses. She had only been away for a day when I looked at the vindaloo recipes amongst the range of great Curry Focus curry recipes. And there was a Beef Vindaloo recipe that I just had to try.

Usually the only thing that you need to be aware of is that it takes a while for beef to cook properly. I checked the recipe and there was the pretty standard 90 minutes simmering time.

All in all, it would take a little over 2 hours to make the curry - not too bad.

And the good thing about this recipe is that you don’t need to marinate the beef in vinegar overnight.

I started making the meal 2 1/2 hours before the scheduled time. I started off by frying the onions and grinding the spices and making the vinegar paste while the onions were cooking. I left the cooked onions for about 15 minutes once they were cooked,to let them cool down, before making the onion paste.

From there onwards it is a pretty standard recipe to follow.

The only observation I have was that there was a lot of liquid in the frying pan when the beef was removed and the cooking of the ginger, garlic and other spices was initially more like simmering the ingredients rather than frying them. Maybe I should have tipped some, or all, of the liquid away. But I didn’t - I just followed the recipe.

I managed to clean up my usual kitchen mess while the final 90 minute simmering was underway.

The dinner guests arrived just as I was putting the rice into the microwave and so it was a pretty uneventful cooking experience.

I served up the Beef Vindaloo curry on basmati rice and everyone got stuck into the food.

And the curry was a great success. The beef was well cooked and everyone agreed it was a tasty meal. A lot of vindaloos suffer from having too much vinegar but this recipe seemed to have it about right - there was a slight taste of vinegar but it wasn’t overpowering.

The Beef Vindaloo received a taste score of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of “Medium to Hot”.

This is one of the better vindaloo recipes that I’ve used and it will definitely be one that I’ll cook again.

The scientists have tested laboratory rats and have also seen a correlation in people who live in the north east of China where hypertension (high blood pressure) is a lot lower than other parts of China – the people in the north east of China eat more chillies.

A good source of capsaicin is a yummy curry that has chilli, or chilli powder, in it.

Capsaicin makes a chilli “hot” and is concentrated in the internal “vein” and seeds of a chilli.

So if you want the benefits of capsaicin in your curry, be sure not to cut away the inside of the chilli.

You can read more about this research here.

And you can read more about the health benefits of curry ingredients in the Curry Focus health blogs.

Vegetarian curry time again. I know we’ve got a got a cross section of people checking out the great Curry Focus recipes so I’m trying to balance trying out vegetarian curry recipes and non-vegetarian curry recipes.

This week I’ve decided to make the Potato and Pea Curry. I’ve said many times in the past that I love potatoes and peas so this is a great combination.

And this is such an easy curry to make. Just a few ingredients needed to be prepared and a simple cooking process.

Should be hard to mess up. But I managed it. I used minted peas instead of plain peas. I just didn’t look at the bag of frozen peas correctly.

So I made the Potato and Pea Curry and served it up on basmati rice.

The eager diners (who sometimes resemble a flock of vultures) tucked into the curry.

Everything was well cooked and the curry was basically a dry curry as all of the liquid had been absorbed during the cooking process. It was almost perfect apart from the taste of mint, which just didn’t go well with the curry.

The curry still managed to receive a taste rating of 7 out of 10 and the spice/heat rating was “Medium”.

I need to make this curry again and use the correct peas to find out what it really tastes like.

This month we look at some very important issues and find that curry spices are helping to not only kill cancer cells but Scientists are also experimenting with common curry spices to see if they can help to reduce the production of methane gas!

Curry Spices to Save the Planet

Curcumin in the Battle against Cancer

Ray tries his hand at one of the tasty Curry soup recipes and also reviews a Massaman Chickpea dish.

Mulligatawny Soup Recipe Review

Massaman Chickpea Curry Recipe Review

Top 10 recipes for last month

1 Chicken Bhuna
2 Poppadoms
3 Chicken Biryani
4 Madras Curry Paste
5 Chicken Curry
6 Easy Chicken Curry
7 Chicken Sagwala
8 Mushroom Curry
9 Chicken Jalfrezi
10 Chicken Dhansak

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

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It’s an annual award made by the Tiffin Club, which is a club of around 60 MPs.

The idea of the award is to raise the awareness of the excellence of South East Asian cuisine as well as to raise money for charity. The award is not just for curry houses but curries do feature really highly on the menus of the competing restaurants.

The award has been running since 2006 and the past winners of the award are:-

Each MP in the Tiffin Club nominates the most popular restaurant in their constituency. The MPs usually ask their constituents to vote for their favourite restaurant and, quite often, local newspapers promote the event and get their readers to participate in the voting.

A restaurant from any South East Asian country can be nominated, covering a lot of great curry producing nations from Pakistan all the way to Vietnam. So it’s not just a competition for Indian restaurants although they do feature in the nominated, and award winning, restaurants.

A shortlist (of something like 10 – 15 restaurants) is compiled and the restaurant chefs are invited to take part in a “cook off”, in Parliament’s Bellamy’s Restaurant, where one is chosen as the winner of the Tiffin Cup.

This “cook off” is a popular event and lots of great food is sold off to those present to raise money for a charity. The charity for 2010 is World Vision

It’s too late to make any nominations for 2010 – the closing date for entries was 20th July.

We’ll bring you details of the winning restaurant just as soon as we get the news.

I’ve made some soup for the first time ever.

Actually, I made it a few months ago but have only just written this blog about it.

There are some great looking soup recipes in the range of Curry Focus curry recipes and I knew that I’d end up making the Mulligatawny Soup as soon as I saw the recipe. It’s such a cool name for a soup.

I did a bit of research and, apparently, the soup is a British invention. And this is confirmed by seeing that the recipe calls for flour to be added to it – this is a typically British way to thicken a sauce or soup.

It takes about an hour to make this soup, including cooking the rice at the start, but making the soup is simplicity itself.

I was a bit nervous about serving up just soup for dinner but I figured that it would be a bit like a watery biryani with the rice and chicken in it. And, in the end, it wasn’t that watery because the rice must have absorbed most of the liquid – it was really like a sloppy biryani.

I served up the Mulligatawny Soup to the diners and it went down pretty well. Everyone enjoyed the meal. Everything was well cooked and it was very filling.

About the only thing that was wrong was that the soup was a bit salty. I made up the chicken stock from powder (I know that I should have picked up some liquid stock). I checked the chicken stock packaging and discovered that the main ingredient was salt, followed by sugar and then this was followed by what you’d expect. Salt was the main ingredient! I’ll never buy that chicken stock again.

Anyway, apart from it being a bit salty, the Mulligatawny Soup was a hit. It was a good, filling, meal. It was nice and spicy, getting a rating of “Hot”, and received a taste score of 7.5 out of 10.

I definitely liked this soup and will be making it again.