So Jamie Oliver has a new book out, Comfort Food, and I was lucky enough to have a wife who wanted a copy for her recent birthday. It was big thick comfortable book loaded with recipes, very much in the Jamie style, tearing and sharing, sploshing and splashing and chucking everything in. Some photographs just appear to show a complete mess eg the lobster macaroni cheese, or the hot chocolate, which shows a mug of the stuff amid a chocolate bomb site. We tried our first recipe on saturday, when we did feel the need of some comfort eating, and as always with new recipe books, chose to cook the first one in the book, with the plan of going through the whole volume in order, as far as we can. This was chicken Tikka Massala, which Jamie recommends you cook over a fire pit in your garden. Or, like us, you can grill it. Basically it is a marinated chicken skewered and chargrilled. The pieces then dropped into a sauce you have made (a load of spices, tins of coconut milk, plum tomatoes, yoghurt etc). The revelation for me was the ground almonds in the curry, which were, it seemed, the main thickening agent. My wife doesn't usually like almonds in any form but she loved this dish. We also had a go at making the paratha breads - which didn't turn out too bad. They are like little danish pastries, rolled and coiled then rolled again and fried. The key is to coil them quite tightly, otherwise when you roll them the spiral just comes apart. So it was a great start to the Jamie Comfort Food journey, though they are not daily meals, being mostly quite extravagant, so we'll be cooking only one or so a week. But will definitely try the CTM again. I had to admit it to myself, this probably tasted better than almost anything we've ever had in an Indian restaurant.
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