Following Recipes

I have such a hard time following recipes. Which leads to the question of why I write them down and share them in the first place. Well, I can follow mine alright. And a blog is a heck of a lot more convenient for me to find mine than to flip through the fifty odd cookbooks I have still packed in boxes from when we moved last October.

I don't know what my issue is. My friend and former roommate Erin gave me a great recipe for lentil curry soup. Have I followed it? As closely as I could with the ingredients I had on hand. But I keep wanting to add an apple. We'll see how that goes. And I did grind use my own ground curry powder, since the Jamaican powder I have on hand has wheat in it. I simply ground everything else up and skipped the wheat. It's really nice and has a bit fresher taste. Just don't get tumeric on everything-- it really STAINS. But prior to my gluten-freeness, I always bought the Blue Mountain Country brand of curry powder.



Ground Curry Powder
Ingredients:
Fenugreek
Tumeric
Coriander
Garlic
Allspice
Salt
Cumin
Pepper


Directions:

With no real reason for this, I used about equal parts of everything, throwing it all in the mortar and pestle. I then tasted and added until I reached the consistency I wanted. For the record, I used whole allspice, whole fenugreek, whole cumin, whole coriander. I used powdered tumeric, powdered black pepper, sea salts, and powdered garlic last time. This time I will use whole white pepper instead. I think I'll stick with powdered garlic if I'm not using right away for storage/spoilage reasons.


I ground it as hard as I could, breaking up everything and then mixing both with mortar and pestle and also a spoon. Fenugreek is especially hard to grind, so I did enlist my hubby's help for a sec (although really I could've handled it myself had I perservered. ) What I didn't use I saved for future use.