I don't know what to say...thank you all very much for your kind comments. I thought people were going to laugh at it! Am I the Susan Boyle of curry making? ;-)

Thanks for your comments Chewytikka - watching your videos and reading the information on this forum has been a great learning experience! Thanks for the help with the red masala mix! I'm bursting to give the Jhal Frezi a go! I'm almost getting to the stage where preparing and cooking the curry is becoming more fun than eating it - bad, very bad.

Ah, thanks for your comments.

Quotehow much you decide to use is down to personal preference. Indeed, I've seen videos of a pro chef in action who also favours the minimal oil approach

Yeah, I don't like an oily curry. That's just a personal preference from my very limited curry making experience (I've only attempted a Madras!). My local BIR's Madras is not an oily curry but has great flavours and heat and is lighter in colour and I suppose I was combining the knowledge I had gained from Chewytikka's video and my experience of my local. I was getting seperation when using the full chef's spoon of oil but the resulting curry was disappointing both to the eye and on flavour. I have found cutting back the oil to half creates a sauce I like and there is a subtlety of flavour which comes through which was not present before. Good to know that some pro chefs use smaller amounts of oil too! Thanks for pointing that out.

And another...

Sorry about that. How's this?

Made this following Chewytikka's video and using his base sauce. First 5 attempts at this produced something which I thought was a bit oily. Had trouble getting the sauce to thicken. Cut back on the oil to a half chef's spoon and started getting great results - lovely, thick, rich sauce. With less oil in the pan once I put the spices in after the tomato dilute I get more of a paste in the pan. Seems to work for me and the resulting curry is nice and hot. It's very quick to cook - 8 mins for this one I think. Get great pleasure from eating it and love the cooking process too. Want to try his Jhal Frezi next but having problems finding the patak pastes to make the red masala.

EASTERN SPICES FOOD STORE-345 MAIN STREET-LANARKSHIRE-BELLSHILL-ML4 1AW

This the one you mean? I've only looked on google street view and it may not be there anymore. If you find it, let me know.

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

For those that like a command line approach to grabbing streaming video...not confined to youtube can download from sites like vimeo etc.