This Curried Life

1. Use chips. If I had more money, I would go to the chippie most evenings to skip the tedium of peeling and chopping potatoes for a family. I fry onions, garlic, ginger (see point 5) and spices, add tomatoes and then chips. They are the ready fried alu in alu matar , alu gobhi,   alu baingan or in tomato and tamarind. Add the veg and continue to curry as you would, knowing the spices are being absorbed into those fat jackets each chip comes in. 2. Pressure cook everything. I laugh at recipes telling me to hang about while meat, dal or potatoes soften. I mentally quarter the time they recommend, but more thorough instructions on how to use a pressure cooker are available...if you have the time. I also love that pressure cookers save gas. 3. Discover hing*. A pinch of this added to cumin and mustard seeds sizzling in hot oil at the start of a curry goes some way to replacing the need for onion and garlic...and so a lot of chopping. I don't think it's intended as a time-...

We live in a town out of Ladybird Books: well planned, neat, and well- behaved. Houses are red-brick or painted white. They are cuboid and clean and accommodate nuclear families of 2.4 children in row upon orderly row. No one has rebelled and painted theirs pink; no youth done graffiti and no architect made a statement in brutalist concrete. No, instead, some of us fry up hot clouds of spice to surround our homes and scintillate passers by. While no one has built a Mahalaxmi temple in our suburbs, the curry leaf, mustard seed and coconut sizzle sometimes makes it smell like they have. A side door opens and a small lady in a sari shocks us with her razzmatazz chilli and cumin bursting onto the pavement. Wow, this town is on fire! There is so much going on. And that's even before she's added the ginger and garlic. Then round another corner and down a street without cobbles, with neither dreaming spires nor fabled domes, my heart melts as if at the sound of lutes and zithers...

A month ago these green trees were wet black branches and this blue sky was a mist weaving between them. It was the Easter holidays and I dressed the children in wool and joined some friends around a bonfire in Girlguide woodland (Crawley Division). There were sausages in pans the size of dustbin lids; a big tea kettle; marshmallows on sticks. When all of that was over and the children were lost in the woods, in a good way, I tried to be discreet as I pulled out two aubergines and asked Brown Owl for permission to roast them in the embers. Awkward, that transition from hot dog to baingan ka barta . I lay them in the pit and reminded myself that any degree of faux pas is worth making to get that smoke into that vegetable. The children were making a den, dragging branches through the trees. The mothers warmed their hands round mugs of tea. I was back in a Panjabi kitchen, watching BNS (I never learned his real name) hold aubergines, and his nerve, over naked flames while they black...