Lamb, Spinach and Potato Curry

I made a long-overdue return to the Hairy Dieters cookbook this week, from BBC’s Hairy Bikers, this time to try out their low-cal version of saag gohst, a mild lamb curry. Found in the ‘Fakeaways’ section of their book, this may have been low-fat, but it can’t be done if you’re low on time.

Before I even started cooking, I dropped into 2 different shops looking for lamb steaks. Perhaps the break between Christmas and New Year wasn’t the best time to be trawling supermarkets looking for food, especially not when a big chunk of our imported food was stuck in a lorry park in Kent. So, I didn’t want chops. Nor did I want minted lamb. Nor mince. Nor liver. Nor… Eventually mum to the rescue (again). She got some steaks from our local butchers.

I made my own adjustments to the recipe. I already had a pot of madras paste, so the ‘mild curry paste’ wasn’t needed. I didn’t weigh the lamb. The recipe asked for 600g, which might have been what I had. I managed to fit it all into one pan (which I later had to transfer to a larger cooking pot).

I had other problems with the recipe- you’re asked to brown the meat and put it on a plate while you use the frying pan for the next step… but the next step takes AGES. So I eventually cling-filmed the meat.

The curry sauce we’re asked to liquidise with a stick blender while it’s in the pan, which resulted in curry going everywhere. The cooking pot was more protective at this point.

I had a sealed can of (dangerously out-of-date) new potatoes, so I didn’t bother using fresh marie-pipers as requested. They were as fresh as ever.

After the spinach was added, the pot was filled to the brim, which I then ovened to cook through.

LSPC took me exactly 4 hours to cook. Obviously, a lot of that time was spent waiting for timers, either for the hob or for the oven, but there was a lot of messing in between. Whether someone without memory difficulties would take that long... well, it took fellow food blogger Flatten Your Curves a lot less than that.

But the end result was very nice. I wouldn’t say it was a favourite, but it was tasty, not overly spicy, and I very rarely have lamb, so it make a change from a million chicken and minced-beef meals. Plus, there’s enough for a few servings.