I try to limit our take out tendencies to one every 2-3 weeks. If I'm tired and cranky, we are short of time or just fancy a bit of a treat then you can bet your ass we will call in dinner. This usually occurs on a Saturday night and largely involves pyjamas. It doesn't take a lot to impress us and the fact you can pick up the phone and have an actual human person arrive at your door with a pizza only 30 minutes later is a huge deal to us both. You should see that face staring up at the delivery guy in pure awe, dressed in a onesie and clutching a pound coin tip. Ava's pretty impressed by the whole thing as well...
My favourite food to order in would have to be Indian. I adore a good curry and go crazy for the condiments. I could eat a tray of pilau rice on it's own and have been known to buy a whole naan and three tubs of pakora sauce on the way home from the pub. Obviously I'm too grown up to do anything like that now. Ahem. But I've converted many a curryphobe to the wonders of Indian grub and Ava could live on poppadoms and chicken pakora if I let her. My Mum can vouch for my curry obsession - apparently when I was little I used to get up early on a Saturday morning and raid the fridge for their leftover Friday night bhuna before climbing back into bed with my folks, covered in curry...
Sorry about that Mum.
One thing I 've always shied away from is cooking Indian food at home. Which is surprising when I go to the lengths of making authentic Chinese dishes, rolling my own sushi and cooking complicated recipes. But it's always seemed like such a slog. I recall my Dad making his own curries from scratch and although they tasted amazing it seemed like he had to spend hours in the kitchen making them. Ava's Dad used to make a brilliant curry taken from a Jamie Oliver recipe and while I was more than obliging when it came to eating it, I used to watch him laboriously grinding spices in a pestle and mortar and think 'bollocks to that'.
But when Hari Ghotra sent me over her Makhani curry kit to review she made it seem a lot easier. An authentic curry with all the fiddly and annoying bits done for you. No need to weigh out spices or spend hours grinding (we are still talking about cooking). All I needed was to buy the basics: chicken, butter, yogurt, a couple of onions, etc and then follow the instructions carefully laid out on the inside of the packet.
And the result? One seriously tasty curry. The spices are divided into little packets and the instructions listed step by step. It's pretty fool proof if you love curry and want to make it at home. It's still a bit time consuming and took just over an hour which is slightly longer than I like to spend in the kitchen on a week night but the results were worth it. I used Total Yogurt instead of cream at the end because: thighs - however you can tell that with a good dollop of double this would have been absolutely heavenly.
Know what I really loved about this though? I didn't feel like I was cheating. I hate the idea of recipe 'kits' as often it is no better for you than buying an additive packed jar of sauce full of sugar and crap. But all this does is take all the different fiddly spices that would take ages to organise and cost a heap of money and gives you just the right amount and mixes them together in the correct way to make a damn good curry.
If you are a better woman than me and fancy doing the whole thing from scratch then you can find the entire recipe right here on Hari's website.
Products were received free for the purposes of a review.
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