Food in Provence (and elsewhere)

As my partner is away today and tomorrow, I have a free choice of what to prepare from our section’s assignment. There’s a beetroot & raspberry salad, a lamb madras curry with mint chutney & a cucumber (not banana!) raita, poori and poached pears in saffron syrup. There’s no way I’m going near pears if I can avoid it but I figure I can fit the rest into my order of work—although after discussing with Florrie on Tuesday I’ll be making paratha rather than the poori.

There isn’t a great deal of preparation I can do before assembly as the main component of the curry—the lamb—won’t arrive until class starts. I can, though, blanch and skin almonds and slice 4 onions into rounds. This latter proves a little controversial with Laura, back again as my teacher today. As she rightly points out, cutting onions into rings with a knife is more dangerous than cutting half moon shapes and not really necessary given the cooking time the onions get. Indeed, despite Pam’s insistence on the rounds on Tuesday afternoon, Laura actually cut half moons!

I mess up a little at the beginning as I forget that the cut up lamb needs to be left to marinade in grated ginger for a while before browning but, fortunately, realise this before actually browning the meat so it’s more of a delay to my planning than a real problem. There’s actually another delay as I need to clarify some butter to sweat the onions. That, doesn’t cause much delay overall, though, as I revamp by order of work and make the raita and start on the mint chutney earlier than planned—I can do these while the butter is clarifying, the onions sweating and the meat browning but the paratha dough needs kneading, so full attention. I say “start on the mint chutney” as the recipe says “a large handful of mint” but to get the required greenness you need more like a large armful. An order goes out for more mint from the garden!

Then, after putting a couple of beetroot on to cook, I make the paratha dough and finish the mint chutney. With the chutney finished, there’s another 15 minutes or so for the paratha dough to rest and for the curry to finish cooking in the oven but there’s also a chopping board, a few knives plus a stack of pans and bowls to wash and dry so I’m not idle.

The lamb is cooked after its hour in the oven and it tastes pretty good after I’ve added the juice of a couple of limes and some salt. The beetroot are also cooked (you know they’re cooked when the skin starts to come off) but it’s 11 o’clock by now so I’m not sure I’ll manage to finish the parathas and the salad. Fortunately, though, I need to make yet more clarified butter for the parathas so while that’s melting in the oven I have time to turn my paratha dough into 16 little balls and also plate beetroot slices cut with a mandolin and scatter over some raspberry halves.

Then comes the fun part and why I wanted to make parathas, not poori. For poori, you just roll out the dough and deep fry it. It might puff up spectacularly, but the rolling out is pretty simple. For the paratha, though, we had a masterclass from a fellow student on Monday. Rather than coating a disc of dough with clarified butter, folding it into a quarter-circle and rolling out into an elongated triangle (Rory’s paratha), AS rolled the butter-coated disc into a sausage, spiraled the ends into the middle, folded one half-spiral over the other and rolled that squat cylinder out into another thin disc—so you end up with something having many layers, akin to a block of puff pastry. My first attempt was a little poor, but I’d misremembered AS’ demonstration and not used much flour during the rolling out. Laura put me right and the next few I did turned out OK—AS even gave them his seal of approval, although saying that I should have used more clarified butter when frying them (I’d followed Rory’s approach of frying the first side in a dry pan).

I then had a stroke of luck. I’d made a full batch of paratha dough—enough for 16—rather than the half-batch people had been set on Tuesday. My clarified butter ran out after cooking just eight, though, which meant, at around 12 o’clock, I still had enough time to put the finishing touches to my beetroot and radish salad and present everything in good time.

Laura was pretty happy with the dishes and also that I’d completed them all. And I was pretty happy with them too—even, to my surprise, with the beetroot & raspberry salad—when I ate them for my lunch.