Celebrating Diwali
Tomorrow is Diwali, the Indian festival of light. This is brightly coloured, joyous and is celebrated with religious offerings, fireworks, candles and lots and lots of delicious food.
This is usually celebrated in my office with a mountain of THE most amazing samosas which are kindly supplied by the BI team that sit behind me. The team also come in wearing really beautiful clothing. Happiness is infectious. This really was never a day to work from home or you would be filled with regret the second you saw the messages circulating about the samosas in the kitchen.
I have always enjoyed samosas but these meat samosas and vegetable samosas taught me what truly great samosas taste like and led me on a path of researching and finding the ultimate samosa. After testing and sampling many, many samosas (I know, I know, tough job. Remember not all heroes wear capes!) I finally found what I think is the ultimate samosa. I really do have to stop myself from eating them when they are cooked as the sensible part of my brain tends to switch off and the greedy part takes over.
Whenever we have Indian food I like to make lots of different dishes so it is a real feast. Favourites in our house are samosas, bhajis, chickpea and spinach curry, butter chicken and biryani.
If you really want the best flavour the thing to do is to cook the day before you want it and leave the flavours to mature, it is amazing how much better the dishes taste the following day. I don’t usually have the self control to be honest because when I smell it cooking my brain just knows that is what I must eat.
What I really love if I am honest is the next day when all of the meat has gone from the butter chicken and you are just left with the gravy, taking some naan bread and just enjoying it as a little snack, so, so good.
The butter chicken and biryani have marinating times so you just need to plan in advance. In truth if you don’t have the time to marinate for longer than half an hour they will still be good but the longer the better.
I really love cauliflower so if you don’t eat meat, try the cauliflower biryani, honestly it is fantastic. Something about the slightly bitter tasty cauliflower which really stands up to the spice well. Delicious. You could also do butter cauliflower although in my recipe I have used Quorn. If you want to use cauliflower just use 2 heads of cauliflower and marinate in the same way. All of the vegetarian recipes can be adapted to vegan recipes and are in the instructions.
Happy Diwali!
Enjoy the Indian inspired recipes and tag me if you make any. I am off to find filo pastry.