the second pancake

I love potatoes, and I love mayonnaise, but I just can't handle the combination. There's something about the standard creamy potato salad served at barbecues throughout summer that is too cloying, too much for me — I feel like one spoonful and I've exceeded my RDI of mayo three times over. It doesn't help that an alarming number of these potato salads also contain undercooked potatoes, so I tend to steer clear. I know I'm not alone: I was at a barbecue a few summers back when the topic seemed to hit a nerve in a friend's (now ex-) girlfriend who visibly annoyed asked, "Why are so many potato salads undercooked??" A voice offered charitably that maybe they're meant to be a little undercooked. "They're not okay, they're fucking not!"

Yeah, she was a psycho. But a psycho with a point.

Well you won't find any undercooked potatoes in this salad, and nor will you find mayonnaise. The salad itself is fresh and extremely simple to make, and tossed with a dressing that's tart and full of wonderful spices it's a refreshing change from the usual.

(1) This is a tricky one. There are so many different ways to get tamarind that unless your preparation is exactly the same a mine the balance of sourness will be different (mine is a very concentrated paste with the texture of molasses). Also, not everyone has easy access to tamarind in any form, so: If you have tamarind, use it to taste. Otherwise use lime or lemon juice, and I'd recommend about 1 tsp.

Does anyone remember 'spice advice'? A part of me knew that promising a semi-regular feature would be doomed to failure. I put together this recipe for a spice advice feature on cumin, and while I won't go through the whole rigmarole of describing cumin in excruciating detail, the recipe was already written and the photograph already taken, so it would be foolish not to get it out there.

What I will say about cumin is that it is the best. It's never going to have the surprising, special-occasion wow factor that spices like saffron have, but it's an all-rounder, a staple of so many varied cuisines that it deserves maximum respect. As with many spices, it loves a bit of toasting.

Here I used it to make a curry of lamb & chana dal. I may not have taken the most appetizing photo, but believe me when I say that this is a hearty and comforting dish.

(1) Use a braising cut such as lamb neck.

This may be the wrong thing to admit in the first sentence of a post about chicken korma, but I have a confession to make: I don't entirely know what proper chicken korma is. Although I've eaten it countless times, I've ever had the same korma twice. A quick flickr search suggests that I'm not alone, either — korma seems to come in all shapes, sizes, and colours.

I have a bit of an idea, though. When I think of korma I think of a rich, creamy gravy, warm, sweet spices, and nutty, mellow flavours. As the story goes korma was first made for rich North Indian merchants wanted their curries to be as luxurious as possible, so unsurprisingly korma is not dish done by halves. Cook this low and slow to ensure as tender chicken as possible, and for the best results cook it the day before you plan to eat it. This is good advice for all curries, but the subtle flavours in this curry benefit particularly well from a night in the fridge before serving.

For most Western cooks, European herbs and spices are manageable: if you don't like parsley you can leave it out, and pepper fans will add it to taste without batting an eyelid. The more 'exotic' spices, however, are another story. When a recipe calls for a mixture of these spices many will follow it unquestioningly, amassing a catalogue of recipes with very little understanding for what they're actually doing.

This might not be you, and perhaps I'm addressing it to the wrong crowd. However I know heaps of people who "love cooking Indian food" yet couldn't pick fenugreek out of a spice lineup. This is okay; we're not all obsessive about food, and with so many good recipes out there it's easy to make tasty meals from obscure spices. But that said, nothing's more freeing than having the confidence and experience to improvise.

With that in mind, I had a crazy idea: to profile all of my favourite spices over a series of posts. For each I'll try to describe how they taste, and give a recipe that showcases that ingredient's best qualities. It's ambitious and I make no promises about how far into this journey I'll get, but hopefully I can inspire you to experiment with spices and learn a thing or two myself. Here goes nothing.

No wait, here goes coriander seeds.

I'm a little pressed for time, but I want to post this recipe for you to try because it's so damn good. To that end, I'll be brief and keep the paragraphs of bullshitting to a minimum. Chana masala is a North Indian chickpea curry that may be one of the best value dishes around. It's inexpensive, simple, quick (with canned chickpeas), and of course, really tasty — this dish is much more than the sum of its parts.

The flavours should be hearty, spicy, and a little sour. Serve it with basmati rice or even more tradtionally, battura.

Lucy and I were at an Indian festival a few years ago when we ran into an Indian fried from uni. When I mentioned that we were about to get something to eat, she looked at us and said, "Oh, you should get butter chicken. White people love butter chicken!" I felt vaguely offended at the stereotype, but when you think about it, white people kinda do love butter chicken. It's on the menu of every western Indian restaurant, and its close cousin tikka masala has been called England's national dish. If you ask me, the stereotype is accurate. I can say that, too — some of my best friends are white!

With such a popular dish, everyone has an opinion on how it's meant to be made. This recipe belongs to Alfred Prasad, the head chef of Michelin-starred Indian restaurant Tamarind (that's how you know it's good). I first saw him teach a chef how to make it on Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and a bit of googling turned up the recipe and an instructional video online. I find those videojug recipes dreadfully slow to watch, so I've reprinted the (slightly modified) recipe here and broken it down into its separate stages. Give it a go, you'll have white people falling to your feet in no time.

(1) The easiest way to do this is in a mortar and pestle with some coarse salt. However it should be fine to add them whole.

Dal makhani

Why do you cook? Do you cook just to feed yourself? Is it because you enjoy the food, or because you enjoy cooking itself? Do you cook to impress people? Do you cook for yourself, or do you cook for others?

Gentle reader, you'll have to be extra gentle around me today. If you've noticed the posts slowing down over the last week, it's because in my evenings I've been busy helping to pack a year's worth of clothes, providing a year's worth of preemptive tech support, and most importantly spending a year's worth of time hanging out with Lucy. And yesterday, she flew off to Japan.

This morning as I was planning my meals for the week, nothing came to mind. Left to my own devices I'll usually throw together a miscellaneous bowl of pasta for dinner, but with Lucy around I'm motivated to make things special. Now that she's overseas (I originally said 'not around', but it's not like she's dead), it's become obvious that a large part of why I cook is to serve food that makes people happy — and there's no one I want to make happier more than Lucy. I loved cooking 'hated' ingredients in a way that she could enjoy for the first time, or when we'd be eating at a restaurant and she'd say, "Yours is better". That desire to cook good food as an expression of how I felt is what started my serious interest in cooking. It's no wonder I ate so poorly when I was single.

So does this mean the end of posts at the second pancake? Not quite. Despite the sappy (but true) "cooking as love" angle, the other part of me cooks for the challenge, the competition. Some would accuse Gordon Ramsay of taking the fun out of cooking, but ignoring his media saturation and the entire US series of Hell's Kitchen, I admire him for his obsession with perfection — you can always do better.

Speaking of which, let's get on with it.

Time surges on, and now it's only two short weeks before Lucy's off to Japan. I cooked dinner for her relatives who were visiting Adelaide, and at her request: beef & potato vindaloo. I know, I know, vindaloo is made with pork. Even if it were made from meat other than pork, Indian Hindus would disapprove of beef. And despite the presence of "aloo" in the name, the dish traditionally doesn't contain potatoes either. But when traditional Indian cooking is leaving the country for a year, then I'll make it the way traditional Indian cooking likes it.

My Mum's side of the family are Portuguese-Indian from Goa, which would be an excellent launchpad to talking about how much this classic Goan dish means to me and my cultural identity. That stuff would kill. Unfortunately I've never actually had a proper vindaloo outside of a restaurant, so like most regular schmoes I used a recipe. Be careful when selecting a recipe — it shouldn't contain tomatoes, yoghurt, or god forbid, cream (really it shouldn't contain beef or potatoes, but that aside...). The recipe that I used (below) suited making it with beef and potato, but the best and most authentic vindaloo I've ever made was from this recipe on eGullet (pictorial here). Try both, you won't be disappointed.

Continuing the Indian food theme, last night I made dal makhani and garlic naan. First things first: dal makhani. You might have heard of murgh makhani, better known as butter chicken. Dal makhani shares flavour elements with murgh makhani — particularly in the liberal use of butter and cream — but it is a distinct dish and by no means a 'vegetarian' butter chicken. This creamy, aromatic stew of pulses could take your butter chicken any day of the week. I used a recipe from A Life (Time) of Cooking, and in my opinion the recipe is flawless.

But I digress. This post is about naan, the second most delicious of Indian yeast breads (well-made Battura tops the list). This was the first time I've made naan — I could never be bothered making a yeast bread from scratch, measuring and mixing and kneading and rising and rolling and rising, just to serve as a side dish. I'm here to tell you that it's not a hassle. And if it were a hassle, it would be well worth it. Indian curries will often require you to wait for lentils to soften or meat to tenderise, and that's the perfect time to make naan. You could even make the dough in this recipe and freeze it for quick, fresh naan later on.

This recipe was adapted from Stef's at the Cupcake Project. I've made some minor modifications: these are flavoured with garlic, it's a half recipe with measurements by weight, and mine are cooked in an oven. Naan are traditionally cooked against the scorching walls of a tandoor oven, an appliance most Western homes don't have. However, by turning my oven to its hottest setting and preheating it with a cast iron pan inside, I managed to create a furnace that was off the scale of my oven thermometer and cooked these babies in less than 3 minutes. Next time I plan to turn the grill (broiler) on at the same time to boost the heat even further.

Oh yeah, the recipe...

I remember the first time I made parathas. It was a few years ago when I was starting to become interested in cooking. An indian friend heard about this, and suggested I make aloo parathas.

"They're so easy, just make a simple dough from flour and water, wrap it around some spiced mashed potato, roll it flat with a rolling pin, and cook it on both sides like a pancake."

In her defense, that is pretty much what you do. Although her instructions assumed a fair degree of prior cooking knowledge, she was so confident that I couldn't let her down by admitting confusion. The resulting parathas were a spectacular failure, suitable for little other than homemade grout in DIY bathroom renovations.

Fast-forward four years. I can now successfully boil water, toast bread, microwave beans, and if I may say so myself, cook a pretty decent paratha. This recipe would be nothing without Manjula of Manjula's Kitchen. While my paratha dough recipe is slightly different, I learnt the technique from her videos and my parathas feature Manjula's (extremely easy) paneer as a starring ingredient. I've used paneer (an indian cheese) here, but you can fill parathas with anything including potato, spinach, lentils, or minced meat.