Something to make: a chickpea and potato curry
Plus, Last One Laughing, fish-forward nachos, and more book recs
What is the laziest possible curry, short of dumping a sauce out of a jar?1 Probably this one, which is a weeknight wonder that also doesn’t offer anything radical: just a very nice, veg-packed, filling dinner.
This recipe is based off Meera Sodha’s chickpea and potato curry from her cookbook Dinner, which I continue to recommend as a bible for Asian-skewed veg-heads everywhere. Here is her recipe in the Guardian, and you’ll see that it is not complicated. But I didn’t want to go to the grocery store or spend any money, so I tweaked it to make it more limey and more lazy. A life motto if there ever was one.
The vibe here is coconuty, lime-heavy, and not heavily spiced, making it both quite creamy and pretty light. You could add all kinds of things to it — I went with the remains of a bag of spinach that was both half-frozen and half-slimy in the veg drawer, and so otherwise inedible. Guess what: in this curry, the spinach was banging. Save your spinach! Make this curry!
Ingredients:
For the base*
2 tsp olive or neutral oil (I’ll be honest I never measure this and though yes, neutral oil or even ghee are best, who really cares)
1 onion, very finely chopped (or you can puree, see instructions.)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp sriracha
Zest of 1 lime (and juice of said lime, see below)
2 tbsp garlic and ginger paste (or replace with 1 tbsp each grated ginger and garlic, grated with a microplane. I buy this paste in my local Sainsbury’s and it’s an extremely useful hack. I can also sometimes get lemongrass paste and I would definitely add that if I have it, and turn this into a laksa, see note.)
For the rest*
1kg bag of new potatoes, halved or quartered
1 tin of chickpeas
1 tin coconut milk
The juice of that lime; ideally a little lemon juice too (which helps season it)
1 bag of spinach
2 tsp flaky salt (or less with fine salt — let’s be honest, you must taste regularly and decide for yourself!)
Yogurt and some chopped coriander, if you like. Crispy shop-bought onions are nice too! I just have this as is, but some parathas (Meera’s recipe above), naan or rice are all great.
The first step in this recipe is considering what you’ve already got in the house. Some people always half-ignore the recipe, but others stick to recipes religiously, so here is my explicit encouragement: do not stick carefully to this recipe! It’s very hard to mess up! Use the potatoes you have, the chickpeas you have, the greens you have (no greens? use frozen peas), and swap in a different kind of chilli sauce or play with the proportions. This amount of sriracha produced a non-spicy curry for me, but with a hint of that sriracha tang. You should tweak based on how spicy your sauce is and how spicy you’d like it to be. Paneer or cubed tofu would also be great, as would many other kinds of veg.
Finely mince the onion (unless you would like to puree it first with the olive oil, un-grated ginger and garlic, which is also a great option.) Put a pot on the stove with the oil, add the onion if you’ve chopped it finely, and let it soften while you chop your potatoes, stirring regularly.
Once it’s softened, add in the other ingredients for the base, stirring regularly so it doesn’t burn. You want it to change colour a little, from bright to darker red, and be fragrant — maybe 5 mins? Turn down the heat if you worry it’s sticking a little.
At that point, add in the coconut milk, the potatoes and the chickpeas, and a little salt. (You’ll check the seasoning later.) Give it a good stir, and take it up to a boil, stirring from time to time since the potatoes can stick. Then turn it down to a low simmer and set a timer for 20 minutes — it will probably need around half an hour, but it can depend. Basically you want the potatoes to be fudgy — take one out and see if it collapses when you press it with a fork.
Once the potatoes are cooked, turn off the heat, and stir in the spinach until it wilts, and the juice of half a lime. Let it cool down a tad if you’ve got time, it’ll be easier to taste. Add more salt if needed, the rest of the lime juice if needed, and if you feel like it’s still a little lacking — a little squeeze of lemon, which can help just bring all the flavours together! This is also where you can add a little chilli sauce if you feel it doesn’t come through as is. Spoon into bowls and finish each with the chopped coriander and a big blob of plain yogurt. Needless to say, this will keep for a good few days and will taste just as good or better.
Note: If you don’t have potatoes, you could also thin this out and use it as a cheat’s laksa. Just ladle it over pre-cooked noodles of any kind (and here a dash of fish sauce and the lemongrass paste wouldn’t go amiss either), and top with shredded green onions, crispy onions, maybe a little chilli oil; prawns, tofu, leftover rotisserie chicken — yum!
Other recommendations:
I made some mackerel nachos the other day, which were pretty polarising. (I was yay, Andy was nay.) They were very fish-forward, and I served mackerel paté thinned with creme fraiche, a little curry powder and lemon on top of M&S brand COOL RANCH DORITOS! Layered up with pickled radish, finely diced cucumber, and lots or coriander, with flaked mackerel on top. Ok, not for everyone, but I loved it. It was improvised based on Helen Graves’ crabby curry nachos, which are quite bougie and much less likely to divide.
Another hit for people who like baked goods but don’t like them too sweet were blueberry cheesecake bars from the beautiful cookbook Baltic by Simon Bajada. This recipe isn’t online, but all kinds of eastern European ‘curd cheese’ and fruit recipes are, and they are barely sweet, with a firm and cheesy curd, and so satisfying. Any Polish supermarket will have cheese curd, and most London Sainsbury’s will too. (My local Budgens even sells frozen sour cherries.)
On the other hand, if there’s a summer birthday coming up, may I point you towards Rosie Mackean’s towering mango pavlova cake. I’d never made a two-tier cake in my life, but I would trust Rosie with my life, so I made my friend Saabira this mango variation. It looked like a cake assembled by a toddler, swallowed a whole box of alphonso mangoes shipped to west London from India (which I found by cold asking Indian people in the street) and required the full logistical assistance of a former officer in the British Army2, but it tasted amazing. If good mangoes are too hard to find, British strawberries are now at their juicy and exquisite peak, and this recipe is perfect. Just make sure you follow the sponge recipe to the absolute letter.
I must heartily recommend Last One Laughing, which puts a lot of famous British comedians in a room (though chances are there’s one in your country, if you’re not in the UK) and kicks them out when they laugh. This means they seem to genuinely forget about the audience and just become deranged with the desire to set each other off. I’ve watched the season 1.5 times, Andy twice. Do you want to laugh until you involuntarily fart? (We did.) Trust me on this. It’s so dumb and so brilliant.
If you want to go deep, Ezra Klein’s interview with Kathryn Schulz is very intense and (I thought) very moving, on grief, loss, democratic decline, news fatigue, and parenting (You gotta be in the mood). I immediately got her memoir Lost & Found out from the library, which is actually funny as well as moving.
My new bugbear about young women being taken for granted in politics continues: please see this clip answering my question on The Rest Is Politics. In the full podcast they did say it was from Katherine Dunn (this is a brag, and not a humble one), which just meant my own Dad texted me: “was that you.” And I just want to say, the producers did not know they work with my husband. No nepotism here!! Then they addressed it again on the next Question Time, when loads of young women wrote in! I have many thoughts on this but this is all I will say on news and politics now because this newsletter is meant to be a break.
I’m very fun so I’ve just finished Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. Unlike his other books, about how you’ll never get everything done so chill the fuck out, this one is about how it’s totally fine that you’re wracked with anxiety and are obsessed with the worst case scenario. In fact, it’s good. Things could go very badly and it’s totally likely you’ll fail, so just get on with it!!
I also recommend Black & British: A Forgotten History, by David Olusoga, even though I’m only halfway through. It looks hefty and academic, but in fact this is an insanely readable history that will make you sit up every few pages and ask yourself: how on earth did I not know this? It starts with roman Britain, covers the history of Black Georgians3 (we’ve just been to The Mauritshaus in The Hague, stuffed full of queasy portraits of fashionable Dutch ladies from this period being served by little boys, only 6 or 7 years old, who were treated as fashion accessories4). I’m now on the history of the disastrous settlement of what became Freetown, Sierra Leone—and the legal battles over slavery on British soil . . . disregarding the West Indies etc where slavery remained completely legal and in fact very British indeed.
Not a recommendation, but a confession. In my heart, I’m now the kind of person I always thought was utterly middle-aged: I suddenly love educational programming and voluntarily go to history museums, where I very earnestly read every placard with my hands clutched pensively behind my back. Lest you think I get away with this with my ego intact, Andy watches me carefully in these moments just so he can say, “Museum Stance Activated.” But in reality, until very recently, I essentially refused to go to museums (barring the gift shop or cafe), even though I live in London. I’ve actually sat outside the Tate on the grass for two hours, hungover, while everyone I was with went in and looked at art. Worse, I once lived in Amsterdam for seven months, ate at the Stedelijk Museum restaurant once a week5, and never went in. I never went to the Rembrandt Museum! I avoided seeing a single piece of art! Culture, I said? Who cares! I did not give a shit!
By contrast, recently we went on a tour of Westminster for fun on a Sunday, to celebrate Andy’s birthday, and we both agreed we had a really great and informative time. In Seoul and Busan we went to local history museums where I diligently used image translate6 so I could sufficiently read all available informational placards even when they were in Korean. We went to Rotterdam to see modern art and all I bought in the gift shop were postcards of my favourite art. It’s amazing how much you enjoy once you accept you’re on the wrong side of 35, it’s too late now to be cool or do drugs, you’ll probably never be back at school so nobody is going to make you learn something just because for the rest of your life, and also all human knowledge is being stolen for the literal and not intellectual enrichment of some AI bros. So now you better just learn shit and care about art, for fun.
Because I (still) can’t control myself around a bookshop, I’m building up a little backlog of books for Hard Times, when I need a surefire hit. In my stack is Felicity Cloake’s Peach Street to Lobster Lane: Coast to Coast in Search of Real American Cuisine, and Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Read. (Space, food, romance.) I also tell myself this is market research for when I write a ‘fun and not sad’ book, and am observing with interest that the pull of gravitas for writers is hard to resist: it’s genuinely hard to find a novel that isn’t at least a little sad.
Yet another shot out to local libraries: they shout at people who listen to things on speakerphones without earphones. Thank you librarians!!! Not all heroes wear capes!!!
Which, to be clear, can also be delicious. Pre-cube and season some paneer and some other veg, lightly char in the oven in a baking dish under the grill, and then pour over some Patak’s korma sauce and pop back in the oven to warm through for 15 mins.
Thank you to Saabira’s husband William for attacking a full six mangoes until they were essentially hand pureed.
As in the Georgian-era, not in Georgia. 1714-1837, baby!!
The Mauritshaus, which is famous for being home to a wild number of famous paintings including The Girl With the Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch, has made a clear effort to provide context around Dutch slavery— there’s an app that will give you an interesting audio tour. The National Portrait Gallery, since it reopened in the last couple years, also now has a lot of context on slavery and women’s rights, but it’s also added lots of saucy details on who was having sex with who. A strong recommend from me!
They did a very nice butternut squash soup, and I only had one or two friends, at a push.
Yes this required AI and yes I see the grim irony.