In the kitchen again - Beef madras and vegetable pilau rice

I reckon I should have made the shortlist for wife of the year by now! What with all the house cleaning of late and cooking up a storm in the kitchen. There was beef left from Sunday's roast and what better way to use it up than in a curry. We love curries, well Indian food in general really. Our home town Luton is very multicultural, so if you are keen to try foods from around the world then Luton has a wonderful array of cuisines to sample. It certainly has it's fair share of Indian restaurants, one in particular was our favourite and each time we have been back we've made a point of going there, if we don't eat anywhere else we at least eat there. It took us three years before we found a half decent Indian curry here, we now have a one local to us which we regularly use. But of course you can't always eat out can you? So we cook our own, Joe likes to cook Thai curries and I like to cook Indian.

Today I used the Madras recipe from Madhur  Jaffrey's book....

You can find the recipe here rather than type it all out but I do have photos..

 

  

Looks a bit sickly here....

 

 ...it looked like this after cooking and reducing down

I made a pilau rice to go with it, no measurements, I just winged it whilst referring to two different recipes.

Basically I sauted some chopped onions in butter until they start to brown. I added (approx) 6 cardamon pods, 6 cloves, 1 tsp grated ginger, 2 finely chopped red chillies, 1/2 tsp mustard seeds, 1 tbsp garam masala, 1 tsp tumeric, bay leaf & a cup of frozen mixed veg

as I was doing all that I had 2 x 1/3 cups of basmati rice cooking in another pan. I find 1/3 cup per person is more than ample a serving. Once the rice was cooked, I tipped the rice into a fine meshed sieve and poured boiling water over it to rinse off any starch, I can't be faffing with rinsing at the start, my method works just fine.

Put the cooked rice into the pan of onions and spices, mix it all together well and serve.

It was bloody lovely if I must say so myself.

So what's your favourite meal?

See you next time

♥♥♥