Scran

Today very much feels like the start of a new year. The weather is almost spring like and the fridge is finally emptying of cheeses, creams, booze, sausages, cakes and deserts. There is still some way to go and so today will be an exercise is "using shit up"..

With a few days away on the cards the fresh items are the first to be dispatched. One eye on making the most of leftovers and dregs of vegetables and another on what I might cook in a hut in a field in the middle of nowhere.

First of the lastlings to be used is more yoghurt and some fruit. Simple but delicious, all the more because of making the yoghurt by hand. If you like your dairy thick as fuck, then you'll love this. A spoon literally stands up.

Scattered with some apple and banana and pebbledashed with some granola. Served with strong coffee, pills to soothe my banging head and a glass of ice cold fizzy water.

One of the first things I felt proud of cooking, as in the first thing ever, was a roasted root salad. Salads, to me, were always lettucey mounds of uninteresting items, ruined by the lingering taste of raw spring onion or made entirely unhealthy with a monumental splatter of some kind of dressing. Who knew they could come in different forms!

Well they can. In this home they almost always do.

Well this isn't it. it's a sort of riff on it, an improvisation of whatever random stuff is left in the fridge. I present, the unhinged salad. It wasn't great. But it looked good and it was colourful so... swings and roundabouts.

At some point growing up the things we ate after Christmas changed. Just like that. I questioned my mum much later "what happened to the turkey curry?" and it turns out, understandably, after 40+ years of her mum making her christmas cuzza, and then feeding it to us... she had called it quits.

So naturally, today is time for turkey curry. I cooked a whole bird this year and now have a freezer full of it.

But gone are the "tin of tomatoes and a few tsp of curry powder" wonders of childhood, and here is murgir jhol. Murgir jhol is really just chicken curry. Or chicken with sauce, I guess.

Anyway, the main reason I want to make it to use up some of the panch phoran I assembled a few months ago.