When I landed in Australia in the 70s it wasn't at the usual suspects Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide but in Country Queensland in a sugar cane farming area populated by farmers and country folk with the big hats and elastic sided boots, rosy cheeked lasses, you know the deal.

One really excellent dish that I was quickly acquainted with was Porcupine Meatballs and most families would tuck into them around once a week - most men could also cook it as it was a brilliant camp one pot dish. There are variations overseas but it's still very much a Queensland thing. You can serve a family on the following.

MEATBALLS

500g mince - lamb mince is great
1 large onion grated
2 cloves garlic grated
1/2 cup raw rice - basmatti was born for this
grating of pepper and some fresh chopped herbs of your choice.
salt to taste

Mix well and shape into little meatballs

SAUCE:

Tin of Heinz or Campbells condensed tomato soup
good dash of Worcestershire sauce
1 cup water

In a heavy lidded pan bring the sauce to a boil and drop the meatballs in carefully until they are just covered with the sauce. Cook for 45 mins on low and serve with mash and a couple of greens. The flavour hit is amazing considering the rather rustic ingredients. Especially if you use Basmatti the rice, as it swells and cooks, sticks up all around the meatballs like a porcupine, or marine mine

Oops posted before I took the picture, which I'll post after din dins tonight

This series has just been on TV in Australia, missed the first couple but the Sri Lankan episode was great, and this week he was in Bangla Desh and travelled from Dhaka to Sylhet where he reckons most of the families came from who eventually set up the BIR restaurants in the 50s and 60s.

We saw a few dishes being prepared, the Biryani was brilliant looking although no chilli of any description. A few of the others looked a bit "meh" to me. For example the ladies doing a big pot of ground shallots, Garlic and Ginger, tomatoes, some turmeric, cumin, salt and that's your base. now chuck in a heap of potatoes and some fish pieces, some coriander leaves and a few green chillis and simmer it.

Struck me as the sort of curry I would make years ago when I only used Turmeric, Cummin, Coriander and Chilli and everything turned out a shadow of BIR (or AIR).

Later at Sylhet he bumped into several English guys of Bangladeshi descent who were back on holiday to visit the rellies and they all reckoned that Bangla Deshi food is rubbish and BIR is the best 

Certainly an eye opener.

Edit: when I worked in Brisbane in a part of town called Fortitude Valley which comprises Chinatown, but quite a lot of Indian and every other ethnic group gravitates there as well, there were 2 Indian lunchtime cafes right next to each other. One served "real" Indian food - usually 3 vegetarians such as peas and panir, lovely rich curries that only had potatoes and pumpkins as a base, variations on "Chole" etc. with a magnificent veg biryani on offer most days - plus Dhosa and puri to blow you away.


Right next door was a Lamb Madras, Butter Chicken and Beef Vindaloo joint. The latter was always full of Indian Students, taxi drivers etc and while the "genuine" place got its fair share of business the Indians and Bangladeshis seemed quite at home eating the AIR offerings. Wonder if there's a bit of a folklore myth happening about how BIR / AIR is something that most people in the Sub Continent would sneer at.

My Okra is now producing, along with my curry leaves and chillies, all grown in tubs.
Felt like something vegan to start the day, so a quick fry up - took about 20 mins from garden to plate:

The Sri Lankan curry powder also contains my own ground dried red chillies and curry leaves. The jar is GGP I made and there's also black cardmoms which got cut off in my photo.
AArrgghh sorry about quality of first two shots, still trying to get to grips with "Paint.net" resizing 

I have a modern slow cooker which is oval, huge, and would feed half of Bengal per batch. I really needed something smaller as I'm the only curry eater in the family - something around 2 litres.

So I started looking around charity shops and came across an original Monier Crockpot. I don't know about the UK but over here they were introduced in the late 70s - the concept died out in the 90s but has been revived in the last ten years or so. In Oz if you say "crockpot" everyone knows what you mean.

I found the device (in orange of course to match your funky Life on Mars kitchen ;D) in a Lifeline (= U.K. Samaritans) shop. Only cost me 6 quid UK money. All electrical items in charity shops must be tested by a sparky, who do it as a community service. Unit works perfectly, I'd guess it's around mid 80s.

So, Sri Lankan Chicken on the bone curry cooking up at the moment, I'll post a pic on serving.
The thing that impresses me about Sri Lankan cooking is that, being a smaller country there seems to be a bit more consensus on recipes than the vast Subcontinent - if you look on various sites the ingredients and methods are fairly consistent. Especially the use of coconut milk, coconut cream, creamed coconut, toasted coconut.. did I mention coconut at all?  Also curry leaves by the wheelbarrow load. Fortunately I have a couple of trees on the go.

With the money I saved I finally bought an electric spice grinder, and made a big batch of Sri Lankan Roasted Curry powder.

Scandal? What scandal? Send me some! Horse used to be my favourite meat back in the 70s - especially when I was on holiday in Southern Italy.

It was commonly used in BIR restaurants in Cardiff at any rate where the menu would generally read like this:

Beef Dopiaza
Lamb Dopiaza
Meat Dopiaza
Chicken Dopiaza etc

And no, it's not an urban myth along with the frozen cats and the half a labrador in the Chinese restaurant freezer, whenever I asked the Maitre d' what the meat was on the menu he was always forthcoming.

Sort of in the same taste spectrum as venison and - surprisingly - kangaroo, not beefy really. Actually would be a fair sub for goat.
My Dad always used to go for the horse as well, as he said "what would you rather eat, some fly bitten cow that's been up to it's knees in mud and shyte or a well groomed and stabled horse that just didn't run fast enough  ;D

The Irish horse trade got knocked in the head in the 70s - older forum members may still remember the Daily Mirror publishing gruesome pics on Page 1, but the furore was more about cruelty than health concerns.

Summer is in full Swing here in the Great Southern Land and will be peeking over the horizon in the Frozen North before you know it

Wondering if any UK or American members grow Okra? I always have a few going in pots - they seem to flourish wherever tomatoes and chillies grow and mature at about the same rate, and I guess the would need to be in a greenhouse although might do well in Southern UK, Devon etc.

They are a hibiscus so quite decorative. Two plants give me about six per week, which store nicely in a plastic bag in the fridge till I end up with about ten then whack up a bindhi bhaji, or a curry with aubergine as well.

Ants seem to love them, I think they come for the nectar as they don't seem to do any damage and hopefully they prey on blackfly as well.

We have a mob descending on us to stay over Easter - including young nephew who has been engaged to an Indian lass for a year or more, and we are looking forward to meeting her. Reportedly she's bang up to date but with strong ethnic ancestry and comes from Leicester - sounds like a rerun of bend it like Beckham  ;D

I'll be chef in charge over the holiday, in Australia Easter is very much a BBQ and beach holiday as it's the last gasp of the hot weather before winter sets in - and I'll be flexing the BIR and AIR curry muscles.

Any hints on what local delicacies I could prepare to remind the lass of home? I believe that a lot of the (very large) Indian population in Leicester are from Anglo Indian families who migrated after independence.

I've made a couple of good aloo gobi to recipes on the web, from Manjula's Kitchen etc but often I get the problem that whilst the potato is done to perfection the cauliflower cooks to a mush, or conversely if the caulifower is lovely firm/tender the potatoes are still crunchy in the middle. Increasing the size of the cauli pieces helps to a degree but not much.

I'm wondering if parboiling the spud pieces might help? I realise there's probably a trick because all the recipes add the potatoes and the cauli pieces raw - at the same time - and cook for around 20 mins.

I try to get waxy type potatoes and good fresh firm cauli which are in season here right now. However I like nice spud pieces, not little cubes - and would like to get the results that are pictured in the recipes - any tips?

I don't smoke personally (used to smoke Embassy years ago which dates me  ;D) but the stepdaughter is a bit broke at the moment so I bought a couple of packets for her being Christmas etc.

I thought the UK members might be interested in seeing the new uniform packaging which has just come in here in Aus. and which may be on the way to the Sceptred Isle in the nearish future. Note the only identifier is the plain text area at the bottom, these are John Players Superkings Blue. Every single pack has to look exactly like this now - with a fair few scary pictures to accompany. I don't know how they get on with my old favourites like Camels and Gauloises - maybe they don't import them any more?

So far it's probably not caused a lot of adults to give up, but the idea is to remove the "cool" factor away from the kids and of course to "marginalise" existing smokers socially. Time will tell, hey.

With nearly half the population of Fiji being Indian from various regions they still have a strong Indian based cuisine. Quite a few have migrated on to Australia - my last GP was from Fiji and was Indian to his bootstraps as far as I could see,  but so far I've been unable to find a specific Fijian style restaurant here.

I was in an Asian shop yesterday and found a big pack of Fijian Curry Powder - it smells bloody divine, quite heavy on the Haldi by the looks of it. For starters I was thinking of doing a regular BIR chicken Madras or something, but use the Fijian mix as the dry mix and see how that goes.

In the meantime do any of our expat or Aussie members know about Fijian curries and methods, or have lived there? I'd guess they would go fairly heavy on the coconut?

Hopefully this will play outside of Australia, interesting episode about some local Indian Restaurant cooking.

http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/267/Food-Safari?utm_source=Featured-Programs

- SBS TV is our "ethnic" channel and usually does culturally authentic content.

One hour's drive West of Sydney this morning.  ;D ;D ;D

Currently Spring, so equivalent to your April. However this is freak weather, must be that global warming to blame 

Slow day at work and I was Googling away (why not, I retire today hahahaha so sack me  ;D ;D) and came across what could be a great resource for regional dishes, no BIR here but a hint of mainstream AIR with heavy use of caramelised onions in some of the recipes.

The restaurant is Nilgiri's at St Leonards Sydney which is in a "restaurant precinct" area just to the North of Sydney Harbour Bridge and you gotta be good to be able to lease premises there.

http://www.nilgiris.com.au/pages/indian-recipes/recipes.html

The chef Ajoy Joshi specialises in Hyderabadi cuisine and reputedly makes the most authentic Biryani. I'll shortly be moving about 3 hours drive north of there on the Mid North Coast to retire, and will give it a whirl when I'm down in North Sydney picking up spices from a big Indian store up the road.

In the meantime I've got a kilo of goat in the freezer and will try his Goat Rogan Josh Kashmiri Pandit style, which looks spectacular as well as my having all the ingredients apart from the Rattanjot root (red colour).

http://www.nilgiris.com.au/pages/indian-recipes/indian-goat-recipes/rogan-josh-kashmiri-pandit-style.pdf

Many of his recipes have a photo walk through version as well. It's great that he publishes recipes, and does cooking classes as well - I've got relations nearby, I can feel a road trip coming on 

I'll report fully on the goat effort.

This guy seems to be a mine of useful "Traditional" information. I made a version of his yellow gravy yesterday with ground almonds and caramelised the onions well (as opposed to deep frying them) before mixing in some yogurt. His use of several gravies is a bit reminiscent of AIR gravies but more like BIR in consistency.

Yellow Gravy:

Indian Yellow Onion Gravy

Butter Tomato Gravy:

BUTTER TOMATO GRAVY

The yellow gravy turned out very similar to a BIR and I did a Chicken Korma with it, very nice. Where is this guy? His background in the videos seems quite posh for India - is he at a 5* hotel there or the USA or somewhere?

I cook my gravies and pre-cooks in the kitchen but cook the curries outside on a table on the patio with gas camp stoves and my ally pan. Last night I made a Beef Jalfrezi.

I'm still getting to grips with batch sizes and nearly always seem to make twice as much. After serving myself, there was still quite a bit of curry left in the pan.

Later that night there was a fireworks display up the road and as usual a few dogs got scared and absconded. I heard a noise out back and saw a big greyhound looking dog in the yard. I went out to befriend it and close the gates and ring the Rangers to get it returned to its owners, but it had fled.

I saw that the curry was half gone, I mean literally eaten and licked to the half way point in a clean line then obviously the pooch changed its mind  ;D ;D. Poor dog, I can imagine the pain. Also I hope it's an outside dog not an inside dog or the owners will be sleeping with windows and doors open. 

I regularly buy collard greens (similar to UK Spring Cabbage or smooth Kale) and whilst they are yummy they can get boring, and I understand they are widely grown in Northern Pakistan and India - does anyone have a traditional recipe that uses them? I'd imagine some sort of Saag style recipe but with the collards instead of the spinach?

Precooking the meats (lamb, chicken etc) came as total news to me when I started on my curry career.
It occurred to me that this could be employed in other styles.

I regularly buy a whole Black Angus yearling rump (around 9 GBP a Kilo here in Oz) and get the tender end sliced into steaks and the tougher end just left as is for me to cube up myself.

Inspired by my curry adventures I did a precook with a heap of thinly sliced meat, but using non-Indian flavourings. I initially stir fried it in batches with finely chopped onions then simmered for two hours just covered with water, black peppercorns, a splash of Worcestershire sauce, one grated garlic cube, bay leaves a hint of fresh thyme.

One gripe with the likes of Beef Strog is that the meat can turn out a bit chewy with the quick cook methods. I can now turn out Strog with meltingly tender meat strips, it goes perfectly in a traditional UK style pie filling for pies and steak bakes, and frozen in batches it seems to lend itself to any beef dish that features coating sauces. The resulting stock can be blended back in during cooking as we do with BIR and adjusted at cooking time with a splash of wine, extra herbs etc.

Although I haven't tried it yet, I reckon it would also be the duck's nuts in Beef with Black bean etc.

Thanks to curry for a new discovery  ;D

I visit a big farmers market every second Sunday. This area of South East Queensland is ginger growing territory (I grew a meagre crop myself last year but with farm stuff available for around 4 GBP a kilo for fresh pink moist ginger why would you bother  ;D)

So far I have been whizzing up Garlic Ginger Paste to Levitesh's recipe with water and oil, and to make it worthwhile to drag out the blender, I end up with about half a litre which I store in a takeaway container in the fridge. However as it's a fresh product - as opposed to the commercial jars that have stabilisers etc - it goes a bit sour and manky after a few weeks.

I'm wondering if it can be frozen without ill effect? I've got a kilo of ginger at the moment and a heap of purple garlic but before re inventing the wheel I was wondering if anyone else does this.

I volunteered to do lunch at our Annual Winter (it's Winter here  ;D) home brew club get together in Brisbane. Catering for about 30, cranked out 2 batches of each using the A.I.R. gravies, stocks, precooked meats.

L to R: Butter Chicken (cream added), Chicken Madras (coconut cream) and Beef Vindaloo. Basmatti rice. Raita. The Naan was cooked by a Scottish Member Campbell who's also a curry freak.

Sous-chef Anna (wife of the host )

All scoffed enthusiastically accompanied by pints of craft beers of course. Many thanks to the local "cooking with JJ" classes.

If anyone's interested, last night's Masterchef (episode 40) they had to cook for a traditional Hindu Wedding, Sri Lankan style. Interesting that it was vegetarian - not too much info about the recipes.

If you have a spare hour to waste, episode is here: (8 Parts) - http://www.masterchef.com.au/video.htm?movideo_m=199393