Posts Tagged ‘curry’

The Curry Bible is a cookbook on curry and curry-related food, surprisingly. That seems like a clumsy way to subscribe it but I am not sure what the best way is. It is not just Indian as it covers curries from other cultures as well, and goes beyond curries with a selection of other good, kebab for example. I can’t say Far East though, because that might suggest things like sushi or Chinese. Anyway…

It’s pretty good. Ironically, I found the curry recipes the least helpful. They are difficult to get right. It often tells you to reduce them, and sometimes gives a time, say an hour. In my experience this does not work though: you still come out with a very runny curry. The most success we have had with them is doing them in the slow cooker all day.

The non-curry recipes have been more successful though. The Vietnamese pork has found itself onto regular rotation in our kitchen, and a few other dishes repeatedly pop up too.

The section on sauces is also very useful. If you want to make a Thai red curry sauce rather than using a jar for example, the book will gives you instructions on how to do it.

Following on from my previous post looking at statistics we can pull out from the Leeds Restaurant Guide dataset, I wanted to look at how the restaurant scene has changed since we first published the guide.

Here it is:

In this graph, I have plotted each cuisine type against the number of restaurants. This is shown for the 1st edition (2013), 3rd edition (2014) and 5th edition (2015). As we learned in the last post, the number of restaurants has risen, so in general, we would expect most categories to have grown between each addition. I have not included pub grub as the size of it makes the rest of the data difficult to see.

For the most part, this holds true. Some cuisines have grown faster than others though. We have seen a rise in restaurants serving American, British, International (those that serve food from all over the world with no real speciality) and steak.

In other areas we have seen a decline though. Buffet, French, Indian and seafood have all seen a decline. Persian has too, but this was always a small market. The biggest change is possibly Chinese restaurants. In the first edition we had seven Chinese restaurants, now we have only four.

In terms of the most popular cuisines, Italian remains king. When we first wrote the guide we even considered splitting Italian into two categories, one for general Italian and one for restaurants that specifically did pizza. Latin is also very popular thanks to the growth of tapas bars. It used to be equally as popular as Indian, but Indian has since fallen away.

We can draw the most popular cuisines in a table. I have omitted hotels and casinos, and international because these do not really tell us anything about people’s tastes.

It is a pretty consistent story. The only change is that Indian has dropped off from a joint-second spot in 2013 to now being 5th, behind British and American. Much of the growth in these categories is down to meat places such as burgers and BBQ so it could be people are looking towards more meat-heavily dishes in recent years. Or it could also just be random chance. The sample size is not that big after all.

I don’t know where I was going with that title really, I just wanted to get the word suit in there in reference to suit day which is where the above picture is taken from. Anyway…

I was pleased to discover earlier today that my fellow co-director of Row One and joint chief of the Buzz social committee Jason Simpson (also of University of Leeds School of Computing fame as well) had also started blogging.

Having recently bought a house with his other partner Sarah, it makes for interesting tales of house renovation, pub trips and the kind of exciting tales you expect from a fellow DYG (Dynamic Young Go-Getter).

Have a gander at Jason Simpson’s blog. Particularly the post where he, a self-described fan of spicy food, adds some legitimacy to my claim that I genuinely had a really, really hot curry back in August and aren’t just a wuss (which is completely unrelated).

We decided to make use of Craig’s free house and order takeaway last night so headed down to Noori on Garforth main street.

On discovering they actually had a full eat in restaurant we decided to just stop there though and enjoyed a very nice meal at a good price. I went for the dupiaza and in true British style – got a side of chips with it 😀 . All in all, highly recommended, very good food for the price.

Glyn having gotten chips and curry sauce for lunch today set me on a mission to go find a curry for lunch.

I was going to see what Co-op had to offer but Matt having never been to the White Rose suggested we take a trip there and so we headed in to see if anywhere in the food court offered such a meal and as it happened, several places did.

I ended up getting chicken tikka and chips from the Asian food place. What I got, I was highly impressed with. Not only was it still fairly warm when I got it back to the office (I drove back so technically I got a tikka to ride 😉 ) but it was very nice indeed, having spent the last several years eating at student takeaways you really appreciate the difference when you enter the real world. Good stuff, recommended.