Tidings Magazine

The flavour of the dish will change depending on the type of curry you use, so pick the curry flavour you like best and run with it, paste or powder. I buy chicken breast fillets when they’re on sale and keep them in the freezer for quick no-fuss meals.

So you didn’t need that mountain of rice. Suffice it to say that rice pudding is not only the perfect way to round off an Indian meal, it is also the quintessential comfort food. Though cooking it can be a tricky and often long process, this particular version is fairly quick and unintimidating. Regardless, rice pudding isn’t the sort of thing you can leave unattended. You must work the whole twenty minutes or so it’s going to take and for that I cannot apologize. I assure you the results are well worth it. Though I am, at times, loath to disrupt the beautiful blandness of rice pudding with spices, the addition of cardamom is truly only an enhancement. If you don’t have cardamom, however, you could always substitute with cinnamon. For a plainer, equally lovely pudding, just add a teaspoon of vanilla or rosewater. The crumbled nuts are a must. But almond slivers would do just as well as pistachio.

Traditionally, soup has not been a significant part of Indian gastronomy. Mulligatawny, spawned by the Anglo-Indian community, is a gorgeous exception. With its orange hue, its creamy base, its use of apple and spice, this soup screams for a cold autumn night, a glass of wine and so-bad-it’s-good television. It’s simple as pie to make. Simpler, in fact. After plunking the ingredients in the pot, you are pretty much free to putter about for a half hour or so, drinking and/or scowling at the fastly darkening sky. A great way too to use up leftover cooked chicken. If you have none handy, you can cook the chicken in the soup. I’ve also found (don’t judge me) that canned chicken works quite well. If you do not have coconut milk, feel free to use heavy cream. This soup is relatively mild in terms of heat, so I like to add a bit of cayenne. Obviously you don’t have to. The addition of cooked rice at the end makes this a meal, but if you don’t feel up to making rice (if you have a rice cooker, you have no excuse), you could always serve this with bread.

A Portuguese-inspired dish from Goa, Vindaloo is one of my favourite curries. Not only is it flexible, versatile and easy to prepare but it delivers precisely the sort of soul-searing heat I crave. Though traditionally hotter than the ninth ring of hell, feel free to accommodate or challenge your own personal threshold. This is an adaptation of Madhur Jaffrey’s Pork Vindaloo (ironically from a book called Quick and Easy Indian Cuisine). Her trick of using grainy mustard rather than mustard seeds and vinegar saves both time and fuss. Like the mulligatawny, this is the sort of recipe wherein once you’ve got it going, you can walk away and do as you please for an hour or so. I’ve used pork shoulder or lamb and both have been delicious. This would, however, work equally well with duck, chicken, beef, venison … anything you can kill really. So long as you’ve got two pounds of it. You’ll definitely want to serve this with mountains of rice so if you don’t have a rice cooker, I’m afraid you’ll just have to make some the old-fashioned way.