Actual cooking - Spicy Fish Curry

As promised before I made Spicy Fish Curry from Leiths Cookery Bible - [Leith, P., and Waldegrave, C., (2003), Leiths Cookery Bible, 3rd edition, Bloomburys, UK].

With Peter (my boyfriend) in my kitchen, we went through the recipe time after time. Honestly, our conclusion was, it is incomplete! What a laugh, a well known and well reviewed book to make such a mistake in a recipe. In addition, the fact that I did not know for how many people this recipe was for, made me open a bottle of wine. Why not.

After reading the recipe with a glass of white wine in our hands this time, we still could not understand at what stage to add the fish into the curry. Prue tells me to ‘Return the fish to the pan’ at the end of the recipe. Mine had not been in the pan yet!

I went back to the website I got the recipe from http://www.prueleith.co.za/blog/index.php/category/recipes-fish and freaked out when I realized I did not forget to print some lines (have to say, maybe the original recipe in the book is set out differently but I did not have the book to check).
Anyway, I gave in and started cooking this shortened (I hope) Spicy Fish Curry because I did not want to let myself down by giving up so easy. I chopped an onion, cored, deseeded and sliced a green pepper and deseeded and chopped a green chilli. Fried those together in a frying pan. All well. When I added the garlic, ginger, ground coriander, ground cinnamon, ground cumin and ground turmeric for another two minutes, the smell that filled by kitchen was incredible. Peter peeked in the kitchen telling me it smelled delicious. It did. I felt a huge relief. This was high quality cooking (without tapping myself on the shoulder of course). Hey guys, so far so good.

Still have not overcome the fish-adding dilemma I decided to season the fish with the hot spicy fish juices and bake it shortly. That said and done I went back to my spices. I added water and reduced the sauce by boiling rapidly, to a syrupy consistency. The recipe did not tell me how long it would take so I poured myself another glass of wine and waited. Sigh. While I waited and took a sip, I freaked out. Why didn’t I think about this before? I grabbed a pan, rinsed rice, cooked water and rice, and read the package. 20 minutes! Sigh. You can’t just eat curry alone, can you?

I mixed the Greek yoghurt with a little water and with the hot fish juices. I brought it back to the boil while I read the sentence ‘Return the fish to the pan’ again. That was what I did. The rice simmered for 20 minutes. I fluffed it up with a fork and served it hot together with the Fish Curry garnished with mint.

The fish was definitely not overcooked. The spices in the curry were, together with the white rice and fish, a perfect combination. I dazzled myself in South East Asia for a moment when a loud noise of our upper neighbor awakened me. The fucker. He always does that! We rose our glasses and Peter and I agreed: today the Spicy Curry Award goes to our very own Abigail Summer. Hooray for me!

By the way, this is why you should eat curry spice: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-470467/How-plate-curry-spice-sex-life.

Warm regards,

Abigail Summer