Chickpea Curry (Vegetarian)

This is a great quick and easy dinner recipe. Pretty cheap, too, if you're into that kind of thing.

Tastes wonderful with Chapati, or rice (you should try adding bits of ginger to the water next time you cook rice - lemongrass works great as well).

Just get out a pan and your usual chopping knife with your favourite chopping board (that nice one made of acacia wood) and get started.

For the curry you need:

• Oil for the pan
• Onions (two will do - more if you like them)
• Garlic (I recommend up to 3 cloves)
• Ginger
• Cilantro (loooads)
• Can of chickpeas (with juice)

The Curry spices:

• Cloves (5 or 6)
• teaspoon of cumin, coriander, cayenne pepper (or white), tumeric
• Salt

1. Heat up pan, add oil.

2. Chop onions, garlic, ginger and add to pan.

3. While they are frying (you want them limp), grind together curry spices. Again, best if you are using seeds and full cloves. Use that special marble pestle and mortar in the back of your cupboard.

4. Add the spices to pan.

5. Throw in the chickpeas with its juice.

6. Stir around for a little while until chickpeas get a little mushy. Throw in cilantro at the very end.

Kheer

Khmeer is an Indian milk rice pudding dessert. Tastes great. Pretty easy and quick. Takes about 15 minutes, but I warn you. A lot of stirring as well.

What you need:

• about a liter of milk
• Cup of rice (works great with whole seed rice or Basmati)
• Cardamom
• Cinnamon
• Optional: Cloves
• Sugar (cane or brown is great)
• Optional: Condensed milk

1. Heat up the milk.

2. Add rice when it starts to evaporate.

3. Keep stirring! It burns quite easily.

4. Keep boiling rice until desired consistency is reached. Some like it liquid, some like it firm. [ATWSS]

5. Sprinkle cardamom and cinnamon. A bit of clove if you like. Dissolve sugar into the mix and serve.

Tip: Don't overdo on the sugar. Milk rice has a wonderful taste in itself.

Chapati (or Roti)

Very simple. Great for any kind of Indian dish. I would almost say, you could completely replace the rice with this lovely, simple and crispy additive. Makes your meal a whole lot more Indian.

The dough is simple, but flattening it can be a little tricky, but there is an easy way to tell if it worked out perfectly: it puffs up evenly like a balloon. Something that I have not been able to achieve yet; I had too many creases and folds, but even then it works out great and definitely good enough.

What you need for 4 rotis:

• 1 cup of flour
• 1/4 cup of warm water
• Some vegetable oil for the hands
• Iron skillet works wonders - adds that rustique taste when it burns around the bubbles.
• Salt

1. Add warm water to salt and flour in a big bowl.

2. Mix together with hands or spoon. Makes a dough that is hardly sticky, but still quite malleable. Roll dough in your palms.

3. Take a knife and cut into four equal bits. Roll them into little balls again.

4. Now comes the tricky part. While the skillet heats up, without any oil, roll them out to a flat thing about 12cm in radius. Should be pretty thin (about a millimeter or less). I used a bottle of wine. Works great. Make sure you sprinkle flour everywhere, so it doesn't stick.

5. Place dough in pan. It will change colour. Flip when brown spots appear. Letting it burn just a tiny bit adds a great taste. It will puff up. That's a good sign.

6. Serve with your butter chicken or chickpea curry or whatever you like. For all I care, cover it in Nutella and peanut butter. Or perhaps lemon and sugar?

Quick and easy.

Tip: Flatten the dough when it puffs up a little. Spread the air within the roti.

Butter Chicken

Had to try this. Greasy, orange chicken. Spices, tomatoes and lots of butter. Give it a try!

Ingredients are not too hard to find. Except for some of the spices, but I'm sure you'll be able to find them in any (good) supermarket.

What you need:

• Time: marinating takes about two hours. The rest goes quick.
• Chicken (half a kilo should do)
• 1 lime
• 1 chili
• 2 cloves of garlic
• Ginger
• 2 or 3 onions
• Optional: almonds
• Some oil for frying
• Tomato paste (a little can will do)
• 1 can of tomatoes
• Some chicken stock (just add one of those little blocks to boiling water)
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 2 cups of fresh yoghurt or creme fraiche

Spices:

• Some cloves - gives great taste
• Some bay leaves
• Cardamom
• Coriander
• Cumin
• Tumeric

1. Chop chilis (as small as possible), then marinate the chicken in it and add lime juice. Add some salt. Set aside for an hour.

2. Meanwhile, chop up the onions, ginger and garlic and set aside.

3. Grind together spices. If you want to be fancy about it, grind whole cloves, cardamom seeds with pestle and mortar. Take about a teaspoon of each. Powder of each spice can be easily found.

4. Add yogurt to spice mix. Stir.

5. Add yogurt mix to the chicken. Let marinate for another hour.

6. Oil frying pan and heat it up.

7. Remove the chicken from yogurt mix, and fry along with onions, ginger, and garlic.

8. Chicken should be getting cooked, pinkish white, maybe a little fried already.

9. With a magic stick, whiz together can of tomatoes and puree. Set aside.

10. Boil about half a liter of water and add stock cube.

11. Add everything you've got the frying pan. That is (1) left over yogurt spice mix, (2) tomato puree.

12. Let heat on, until the tomatoe-y stuff around the chicken halves.

13. Melt butter and pour over chicken.

Not the trickiest thing in the world. There are some experimental fumigation techniques of the butter chicken. Supposedly very traditional. Check it out. Involves coal, aluminium foil. The cloves and cinnamon add a great touch to the tomato sauce. Cinnamon sticks can also be used, but they are harder to find.

Tip: Remove the onions, garlic and ginger when frying the chicken. They almost got a little too dark for my liking when I was frying the chicken.