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Continuing our celebration of SBS's Hooray for Bollywood series, we settled in on Monday night with ' The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey ' and this curry. Again, the inspiration came from Camellia Panjabi's '50 Great Curries of India', a book that is focussed predominantly on meaty curries. Luckily, the curry sauces all sound wonderful, and can easily be applied to vegetarian alternatives. The basis of tonight's curry was a lamb spinach curry, with a marinade and a spinachy sauce. We swapped lamb for vegies, mainly potato, with a few mushrooms and carrots for colour and variety. I think we went a bit overboard on the spuds, so the marinade and spices had too much work to do to spread their flavours fully around, leaving the whole thing a little blander than I'd like. Luckily we're well stocked with chutneys and pickles to liven things up - it would have been hard going to get through dinner and three lunches of slightly tasteless curry. I thi...

It had been over a month since we'd last had Indian - an unthinkable gap given my particular obsession with it - so I spent Tuesday morning scanning our cookbooks for a winning recipe. Cindy's a bit of a korma fan, but the vegetarian option in Mridula Baljekar's book has never really impressed me. Luckily, there's a chicken version in one of our other Indian books that looked like it could be easily converted to a mixed-vegie version. The korma used pistachio nuts rather than the usual cashew option, which gave the picture in the recipe book a rather startling green colour. Mine ended up a more traditional colour, but the flavour was quite impressive. Pre oven-baking the spuds and the eggplant was a wonderful idea - both soaked up the curry flavours particularly well and their softness was a nice contrast to the crisper carrots and beans. If anything, I'd probably cut down on the potato a little next time and add in an additional vegetable. Capsicum maybe. ...

When we left Brisbane, Cindy was given this book as part of her going away present and I finally decided it was time to try out one of the recipes. Most of the vegie recipes seem to be intended more as side dishes than as fully balanced meals and I think the idea is to make a couple of different dishes and feast on the variety. However, given it was a school night, I decided just to adapt the Cauliflower and Potato Mangalore in the book into something with a few more colours in it. This was all further complicated by the presence in our fridge of a big pile of roast vegies from Cindy’s crazy cooking weekend . Anyway, let’s just jump straight to the recipe. Michael’s Mangalore Ingredients Vegie oil 1 can of coconut milk 1 tray full of roast vegies (carrot, potato, pumpkin, turnip and mushroom) A big handful of green beans (trimmed) A head of broccoli (cut into florets) 1 large onion (chopped) 5 cloves of garlic (crushed) A 2-inch piece of ginger (minced) 1 teaspoon of tamarind conc...