I have been really enjoying Sophia Dahl’s TV series The Delicious Miss Dahl. Last week she made a delicious vegetarian curry and dahl and knowing what a curry fan Mr Rigg is I thought I would make it as a treat last Friday night.
So I got all the ingredients – sweet potatoes, the spices to make the garam masala from scratch etc. When it came down to making it I followed the recipe and had fun making the aromatic garam masala spice mix by grinding it up in my loved-but-under-used pestle and mortar.
I seasoned the sweet potatoes and onions as instructed with the the spice mix – but not all of it. Then I tasted it and couldn’t really taste much, so decided to add in all the garam masala. On final tasting it just didn’t taste of anything. I was devasted.
Watching Sophia Dahl cook this recipe I could imagine how it tasted…and yet there were none of those lovely flavours I had dreamt of. I am sad to say that the curry was saved by a jar of Patak’s Balti sauce after a quick dash to the Co-op.
In the end it tasted ok, but was greatly lifted by Unicorn’s dahl (divine!) and fragrant rice also care of Sophia Dahl, which was delicious.
Eat the Earth 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 3, 2010 at 9:08 pm
punkchef
Still not quite sure how I feel about Sophie Dahl’s cooking. I’m watching all of the series, and some of it looks brilliant (the fudge in particular, I made that recipe and it was nummy!!) I wrote a blog about it here, and added my own recipe, too
http://punkchef.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/i-cant-think-of-anything-to-do-with-fudge-that-is-funny-that-isnt-disgusting/
But some of her food just looks a bit “meh”, for want of a better word. It doesn’t inspire, and most of the time it just seems to be a bit “ooh, look how quirky I am”… like I say, not 100% sold on Sophie Dahl, but it could just be the directors fault… not too keen on the style of cinematography used in it, either. But that’s not Sophies fault!
June 17, 2010 at 7:27 am
CharlieB
Ditto – I made her vegetarian shepherds pie with lentils and it was delicious, yet the curry just wasn’t good at all. I do wonder sometimes whether celebrity chefs actually cook some of the recipes, or really write the recipes out correctly. Obviously there’s a whole team of people to make their food look amazing, and a celebrity chef to make it sound like it tastes amazing. But you feel a bit let down when you put lots of love into trying to recreate their dishes and they just flop.