Substituting curry paste

Something that really annoys me is when supermarkets print recipes that feature particular branded products. You try the recipe and it’s delicious so you add it to your repertoire. Then, the next time you decide to make it, you go to the supermarket and one of the ingredients is no longer stocked.

Okay, so generally you can substitute the ingredient but sometimes, you have no idea how because there’s nothing even similar on the shelves.

I should know better than to depend on branded, ready prepared products but the recipe was so delicious, I wanted to make it again. The product was a ‘block’ of curry paste which, like a stock cube, is concentrated and reconstituted in boiling water. The beauty of this particular curry paste is the fact that it is unadulterated: It is only curry and quite mild.

Of course, I could make my own curry sauce but, by the time I was at the supermarket, I don’t know what I do and don’t have in the pantry, given I was intending to buy the product featured in the recipe.

Eventually, I decided to go completely radical and use a new Wagamama branded sauce (coconut, lemon grass and chilli). And, I feel it only right to report, it was delicious. I reckon it’s the way to go.

While that was a lucky choice (which took me a rather long time to decide upon), it will effect my recipe decisions in the future. It will also make me work out how to make the perfect curry sauce without recourse to pre-preparation.

Naturally, Mirinda was completely unaware of this minor skirmish in the corridors of Waitrose. She had book group today and went off to Chawton to discuss the rather odd Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

Unusually, the discussion was followed by a rather surreal little film made in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia. It must have been very odd because Mirinda claims I would have loved it.

While she was away, I took the poodles to the park then made some changes to her website, after managing to fix a bit of software which had decided to stop working.

I’m not going to launch into the technicals but am quite proud of myself for fixing it. I had to delve into my past, dragging up deeply hidden memories of MS DOS in order to do it. Yay, me!