Last weekend I had a couple of old friends around for dinner. I hadn’t seen either of them for over a year so I decided to push the boat out a little and make a range of dishes for them to sample.

I made a spicy potato and cauliflower, dhal and chicken jalfrezi, all from the range of delicious Curry Focus recipes.

The friends were bringing round some fresh fruit for dessert so I decided to try and make some ice cream (kulfi) to go with the fruit.

I know that you can buy ice cream making machines. But I don’t have one.

The Curry Focus ice cream recipe doesn’t need anything more automated than a whisk.

I bought all of the ingredients, conscious that there was a lot of fat and calories going into this dish. But I don’t have ice cream very often so it’s a bit of a treat.

The recipe was easy enough to follow.

It was the freezing and unfreezing that I had to think about.

Before adding the final ingredient of whisked egg whites, the ice cream had to be 80% frozen. I really had to make a guess at what this meant. I kept checking the mixture every 10 minutes after an hour and then finally decided it had frozen enough after 90 minutes.

Then I left the ice cream overnight to freeze.

I wanted to check out the ice cream the next day and found that it was frozen solid. There was no way that I could even chip out portions to eat. It must be because there are no added preservatives – ice cream that you buy from the supermarket never really freezes when you have it in the freezer so it must be down to something that is added to the ice cream.

So I left the ice cream in the kitchen for an hour to let it thaw a little. The ice cream could be spooned out of the bowl but had a fair amount of ice inside it.

I had to go out for the best part of the day so put the ice cream back into the freezer.

An hour before we were due to start eating, I took the ice cream out of the freezer again. Once more, it was frozen solid. By the time it came for dessert, just over 1.5 hours had gone by and the ice cream was almost perfect. I mixed it up with a fork to make sure that the few solid bits were broken up and then served it up with the fresh fruit.

Another hit on my hands!! The ice cream was loved by everyone and it received an impressive score of 8 out of 10.

So if you have a sweet tooth and are partial to ice cream, why not give this easy recipe a try?

Now that was a very interesting question.

The obvious answer is that they come from India.

But that’s only a part of the truth.

In fact curries come from a lot of different countries, the most famous being India. But you also get curries in a lot of other countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Vietnam and Jamaica. Even China and Japan have their own styles of curries.

Each country produces at least one type of curry and some, such as India, have lots of different types of dishes to tempt your palate.

So what goes into a curry? The answer is “almost anything”. The main ingredients around the world are chillies, spices, onions, ginger, meat (including fish) and vegetables. Most curries are served with rice.

Nowadays you can get a good curry in most countries of the world. Indeed, in most cities that I’ve visited, you usually have a choice of the type of curry that you can buy.

I’m not sure that my answer meant very much to my daughter but we had a fun time finding all of the curry producing countries in an atlas.

Time to try another of the great range of curry recipes on the Curry Focus website. My local supermarket was advertising a special on beef so I chose the Beef and Potato curry to take advantage of the special. The way I figure it, the more I save on ingredients, the more I can spend on a beer to have with the curry.

This is another really easy curry to make and all you have to remember is that you have to simmer the curry for about 2.5 hours – so if you’re planning on dining at 7pm then you have to start making the curry around 4pm.

I cut up the beef and mixed it up with the salt and turmeric.

Then I prepared the onions, garlic and ginger and was ready to start the cooking.

I stir-fried the onion, garlic and ginger for about 10 minutes. Then I added the beef and spices and stir-fried for another 5 minutes.

Then in went the water. I brought the curry to a simmer, covered and left it for 2 hours, returning to stir the curry every 10 – 15 minutes.

I quickly peeled and cubed the potatoes when the 2 hours were nearly finished and then added the potato cubes to the curry, stirring well and covering the frying pan again.

I started up some rice after 5 minutes and everything was ready just 20 minutes after the potato was added.

The Beef and Potato curry was served up to the assembled diner (just 2 of us for dinner tonight) and we tasted the results of my cooking.

It was a good curry. Not a great curry but a good one. It had a mild to medium spicy taste. The beef was lovely and tender. There wasn’t much colour on the plate so I maybe should have garnished the curry with some fresh coriander. The curry received a good rating of 7 out of 10.

Of course, there was far too much curry for the two of us. We had the same curry the next night and it tasted a little spicier than the previous night (funny how curries do that). And we still hadn’t finished the curry so put the remainder into a container and popped it into the freezer for another day.

I definitely recommend this curry if you want to try a curry that is not too spicy.

Ray puts together some of the things he has learned in the last twelve months making curries and produces a full meal - Putting It All Together.

Passatta. What Is It? - Passatta is a cooked tomato concentrate that we talk about in this article.

Cauliflower and Potato Recipe Review - A great side dish that is not only tasty but easy to make.

Poppadom Recipe Review - Poppadoms end up being a challenge to cook.

Beef Pasanda Recipe Review - If you like a mild curry and red wine then this could be just the curry for you.

Lamb Rogan Josh Recipe Review - this curry did not turn out as expected so we are looking for more Rogan Josh Recipes to review.

Top 5 Recipes for July

1 Chicken Biryani
2 Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Bhuna
4 Chicken Jalfrezi
5 Easy Chicken Curry

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

In the first few weeks I followed the recipes very carefully, and was sometimes quite apprehensive as to what would be served up at meal times.

In those weeks I was testing myself as much as the recipes and couldn’t adapt during the cooking process if I made a mistake.

And I couldn’t see that certain recipes were wrong or not quite right.

A year onwards still has me carefully following the recipes because I want to make sure that the recipes on the website work.

But now I’m a lot more adaptable and improvise as I go along.

If a recipe doesn’t work then I figure out why and then try it again with revised ingredients or cooking times.

But all through these months I only cooked one thing at a time. A chicken curry or a beef curry or a lamb curry or a vegetarian curry.

So last weekend I decided to make a meal – not just a single dish.

I chose the saag gosht as the main because it simmers for 90 minutes as the final stage and this would give me plenty of time to make the other dishes.

Before starting to make the saag gosht, I mixed up dough for some naan and left it to rise.

Then I made up a batch of mango lassi and put it in the fridge to cool.

Whilst the dough was rising and the mango lassi was chilling, I prepared the ingredients for the saag gosht and then settled down and read the paper for a couple of hours.

After a good read, I started to cook the saag gosht.

Once the saag soght had started to simmer, I rolled out the naan breads and baked the bread. I had preheated the lower oven and popped the ready naans into the oven to keep them warm. I baked all of the naans even though I only needed 4 for dinner and put the extra naans aside to cool – once the naans were cool I popped them into individual plastic wraps and put them into the freezer to keep for another day.

I infused some saffron threads in hot water (in other words, I put about 10 saffron threads into an egg cup, poured in some boiling water and left them for 10 minutes).

Then I made some Aloo Gobi (cauliflower and potato) as a side dish.

By now it was time to cook the rice so I popped it into the microwave after having mixed the infused saffron with the rice and water.

Everything was ready at dinner time.

We had saag gosht on saffron rice, with a side dish of aloo gobi, naan bread and a delicious drink of mango lassi.

It was great.

Everything worked well. No drama during the cooking.

I’ve come a long way in a year but am not complacent. I’ve still got a lot to learn. But it’s fun and the results are yummy.

Some passatta recipes have tomatoes cooked with pork, bacon and vegetables and the resultant liquid is kept and used in cooking.

Vegetarian passatta would obviously not include any meat.

Some people just peel and remove the seeds from tomatoes and then put the remaining tomato thorough a food processor to make a puree that can be kept in the fridge for a few weeks.

If the recipe that you are following only uses a small amount of passatta, you can get away with using tomato paste, or puree, that you buy from a supermarket.

You can buy ready-made passatta from supermarkets or good food shops. The passatta will be in the tinned and pureed tomatoes section.

After last week’s disaster with the poppadoms, I needed to get back into the cooking saddle again pretty quickly.

I decided to try out another vegetarian recipe and this time it was the Cauliflower and Potato recipe from the Curry Focus website.

Very little shopping was needed here because the only thing that I didn’t already have was the cauliflower.

This is an amazingly simple dish to prepare and it is absolutely delicious.

Through circumstances beyond my control, I was dining alone tonight.

So I followed the recipe, step by step, and pretty soon I had a plate full of delicious food.

And it was delicious. There was a divine spice taste and everything was cooked to perfection. There was easily enough curry for 2 (I had the left overs the next day for lunch) and would be a great side dish for a dinner party of 4.

A few days later I had friends around for dinner and decided to cook saag gosht again. The recipe was a big hit the last time I made it and this time I had a great side dish to go with it.

I was running a bit late with the cooking and the guests were very eager to sample the food when I eventually served it up.

The saag gosht went down well but the big hit was the cauliflower and potato side dish.

The word “stunning” came out of the mouth of one of the guests which was high praise indeed.

The dish had a little bit of a spicy kick to it but wasn’t too hot. And the textures and flavours were great.

The cauliflower and potato dish scored a great 9 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium.

This is the recipe for you if you want a great side dish that is easy to make.

Try it for yourself.

I’d been looking through some of the curry books that I’ve got and was struck by the lack of recipes for Poppadoms. Indeed, some books just said to buy a packet from a shop and then grill or fry them. I seem to remember somebody saying that poppadoms were difficult to make.

So here’s a challenge. I did pretty well making naan bread so poppadoms should be easy enough.

There’s a Poppadom recipe on the Curry Focus website that looks easy enough.

I started by making the dough.

It was too dry. Way too dry.

So I added more water, a dribble at a time, until I got what I thought was the correct consistency.

But I obviously got it wrong. The dough was way too sticky.

So I added more flour to dry it up a bit.

Then I rolled the dough out into a cylinder and sliced it into equal rounds and put a dab of oil on the top of the rounds.

But the dough kept sticking to my rolling pin. I put flour on the work surface and the rolling pin but as the poppadoms kept getting bigger, they kept attaching to the rolling pin and splitting.

I was ending up with strips of poppadoms.

I got all of the dough back together a couple of times and tried again but no luck.

I don’t know whether I messed up the recipe or that the recipe doesn’t work. I am fully prepared to accept that the problem was with me. I don’t have a real rolling pin and use an empty wine bottle but I can’t see that blaming my rolling pin is the answer – I think the person wielding the rolling pin is the problem. Maybe I wasn’t careful enough. Or maybe I’m not adaptable enough in the kitchen – I assume that real cooks automatically compensate for dough inconsistencies.

It wasn’t a huge disaster because I had bought a packet of poppadoms earlier.

I’ll try the recipe one more time and I’ll buy a proper rolling pin to see if that makes a difference.

And if the recipe doesn’t work, I’ll hunt down another one.

I won’t be beaten. I need a recipe that works so that I can create my own flavours.

This week I wanted to try out a recipe for a dish that I’d never eaten before. I searched through the yummy recipes on the Curry Focus website and decided to try the Beef Pasanda.

The beef needed to marinate overnight so I made sure that I got all of the ingredients early enough.

The marinade is about half a bottle red wine. Now here was the hard decision. I didn’t like the idea of buying an expensive wine just for cooking (I know that’s probably a silly thing to worry about) but I didn’t want to buy cheap, nasty wine either (because I’d have a couple of glasses to drink). I finally went for a middle of the road merlot.

Now this is easily one of the noisiest curries that I’ve ever made. I don’t have a meat tenderiser so resorted to putting the beef onto the kitchen work surface, covering it with the plastic meat preparation board and pounding the board with a hammer. I made a lot of noise but the beef was flattened just fine.

I put the beef, with the marinade, into the fridge overnight.

The next afternoon, I started to make the Pasanda.

I prepared the onions, garlic and ginger and stir-fried them for 10 minutes. The mixture gets very dry so needs to be kept moving at all times. There was a lovely ginger aroma when the cooking stopped.

I made up the spicy paste whilst the onion mixture was cooling.

After a while I put the onion mixture, along with the coriander and coconut, into the food processor and made a puree.

After that the spicy paste was stir-fried for 90 seconds to be joined by the puree before stir-frying for 5 minutes.

I mixed in the ground almonds and tomato paste and then removed the mixture from the heat.

The oven had already been preheated by now and the beef, marinade and cooked ingredients all went into a large casserole. After mixing everything well, the casserole went into the oven.

I checked and stirred after the 30 minutes and cooked it for another 30 minutes.

I checked the Pasanda once again and all was good.

I returned the Pasanda to the oven whilst the rice was started.

After five minutes I turned off the oven, leaving the Pasanda to cook for a further 10 minutes.

The pasanda and rice was served up to the waiting dinner guests.

The sauce was rich, thick, smooth, nutty and tasted of the red wine. And the beef was very tender. The Pasanda was eaten quickly enough but failed to ignite hearty enthusiasm. One of the guests commented that it would have been better with some yogurt. I did a quick search on the internet and most of the Pasanda recipes did indeed use yogurt as the marinade. So I need to find another Pasanda recipe to try. And one of the guests was looking for some red wine to go with the food but I had already drunk the remainder of the wine whilst cooking – I think this is a valid cook’s bonus.

Overall, the Pasanda was very tasty and scored 7 out of 10 with a heat rating of mild.

If you like a mild curry and red wine then this could be just the curry for you.

Last week we were asked where our website visitors come from. To be honest, we didn’t know the complete answer - we knew where most people lived but not them all. So we checked with Google and the answer was that we have had visitors from 145 different countries. Now that’s a lot of countries. Most of the missing countries in the world are from the African continent - maybe we need some more spicy African curry recipes on the website?

Ray cooks and reviews a delicious Jamaican Chicken Curry Recipe

Time to try out another great recipe from the Curry Focus website. I liked the look of the Lamb Rogan Josh recipe but hadn’t looked at the recipe early enough. The lamb needs to marinate overnight and the dinner guests were arriving in 6 hours. So, instead, I went for the Jamaican Chicken Curry that looked pretty easy to make…. read more

It can always be a challenge matching Wine With a Chicken Curry

I spotted an article that I think might be of interest to you lovers of fine Indian curries.

An Indian wine company called Indage is launching a range of Indian wines in the UK and the wines are reportedly good to drink with a curry… read more

Cumin Chicken Curry Recipe Review

Time to try out another great recipe from the Curry Focus website. This time it’s the Cumin Chicken Curry recipe.

I only had to buy the chicken – the other ingredients were already in the kitchen.

This is really a very easy curry to cook… read more

Top 5 Recipes for June

1 Chicken Biryani
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Jalfrezi
4 Chicken Bhuna
5 Chicken Curry

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