Last night while watching YouTube, I caught a half hour of Jamie Oliver in a program with the name half hour meals. It was interspersed with commercials which although annoying weren't so bad because I'd put the mute on and do a minute or two of surfing then come back to the window to check out if the program had began again. Anyway. Jamie was cooking a vegetarian Rogan Josh curry. I got interested. So grabbed some paper and began taking notes, writing down the ingredients and what he was doing with them. Today I decided to go and buy the various veggies and make it myself. It seemed from his recipe there were two important elements in his style of Rogan Josh. One was a butternut squash, which I've seen but not actually done much with. The other was a jar of Rogan Josh paste, which he swore by. Though, I must admit as I saw him making his rice I thought it odd he didn't even wash it, because everyone knows if you don't get the starch out it turns into a gloopy lump of porridge rather than rice. Porridge might be fine for breakfast with some syrup, but it is not the right stuff for curry. So transfixed I saw him do the curry. The program then went onto another element, I think it was going to be the ten second lemon dippy stuff, but at this point the bloody thing froze on me, so sod the lemon stuff I'd have to go without it, and of course I didn't get to see the finished porrage article anyway. So today list in hand off I went on a cooking adventure.
The thing with cooking programs which is always annoying is being able to purchase the same ingredients as the chefs use, or similar. Also, the other thing with cooking programs is they might be made in a time of year when certain ingredients are quite easy to come by, say for instance butternut squash. This I found out. I checked supermarket after supermarket and could not track any down. In the same supermarkets I intently looked for the Rogan Josh paste. A paste which Jamie describes as wonderful because it's the basic stuff with loads of herbs in it, and on a thirty minute meal it would take too long to show and prepare the real thing. This is either his excuse or he's gotten lazy of late. Maybe Jamie is getting a little jaded and would rather be on TV earning his millions by doing something quite different. Perhaps he'd be a footballer, if not a barrow boy or if all those vacancies were filled he could try his hand at politics. So I couldn't get the butternut squash and made do with normal potatoes. Then I couldn't find the Rogan Josh paste so found something in an exclusive market called a Jalfrezi. My dish had metamorphosed from one thing to something quite different. I nearly forgot, I put minced beef in it as well so now it was no longer vegetarian, no longer a Rogan Josh or inclusive of the lovely but illusive butternut squash. One and a half hours later, it was ready to eat. Yep, even the timing wasn't the same.
I learnt, sometimes it's good to set out on a journey with the hope of getting to some place, unfortunately circumstances prevailing this isn't always possible and other paths have to be taken, in this case it was a meat Jaflrezi instead. Bom Bom.
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