Keralan Veggie Curry with Poppadoms, Rice & Minty Yoghurt

The dish itself, the flavours, at least how I made it, that's a solid four star rating - it was delicious! Everything else - the time management, the style of writing, the layout, - oh, and did I mention time management? - is an utter failure, one star only.

Let's see why. This book promises you'll be able to prepare the recipes within 15 min. In these 15 min, you should: 1. make a curry paste, from scratch; 2. cook rice, with spices; 3. make a yoghurt sauce; 4. prepare and cook the actual curry (this includes grilling the cauliflower in batches before adding them to the curry); 5. heat up pappadums. Honestly, just from reading the recipe, I estimated it at about an hour.

It turned out to be way more than that, because the recipe does not state how long the vegetables (mainly the cauliflower, actually) need to cook. Looking at comparable recipes, such as this one, it's easy to see why - the cauliflower needs to cook for 30 min, and that's excluding all those other steps!

I didn't even have most spices for the curry paste in house; I just used about 1.5 tsp of ready curry spice mix. I skipped grinding everything in the kitchen machine and just fried it directly. And I also didnm't add the juices from the pineapple can, because that's sugar syrup, why for heaven's sake should I put that in a curry? It turned out to be on the sweet side anyway.

Serves 6 rather than 4, and this is a working link.