Posts Tagged ‘india’

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.

Recently, Bill Gates delivered the 2013 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, in which he discussed the struggle to eradicate polio from the world.

The good news is, that it is now only endemic in three countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

This in itself is no small achievement – polio is a disease that takes weeks to diagnose, which means the percentage of the population you need to immunise is higher, in this case 95%.

Take a country like India, with over a billion people – 75,000 new babies are born every day, and each of them requires several rounds of immunisation. That means that you need 200,000 vaccines per day, that need to be taken to rural communities, while being refrigerated, often that need to be carried for miles on foot by health workers. No wonder it took a staggering 2,000,000 people working on the programme – but they did it!

Unfortunately, you can’t stop fighting it until it’s eradicated, but with only three countries to go, the plan is to read that milestone by 2018. But more than being about one single disease, Gates points out…

Polio eradication is a proving ground, a test. It will reveal what human beings are capable of, and suggest how ambitious we can be about the future.

Together, we can achieve great things.

With everything that you need to cook still packed away in boxes, myself and Elina headed up to AM Kitchen & Bar to grab some dinner. It’s one of the few restaurants in Leeds I hadn’t eaten at yet, so I was looking forward to trying it.

It’s tastefully decorated with what I presume is Indian style furniture (I haven’t been to India, so I can only guess), though the window displays were all of various different vodkas. Perhaps there is something I’m missing, but I’m not quite sure what the connection was there.

The food itself was great, probably slightly more authentic than Cafe Guru and equally as good. I really enjoyed my chicken dopiaza, though I was a little disappointed with Elina’s lamb pasanda. They also had excellent chocolate mints, so I might just order a bowl of those next time.