Aloo Tikki Chaat

Despite having moved to London in August, I feel like I’ve hardly seen the city. This is down to a combination of factors; I’ve been working on my PhD (an alarming truth), I’ve been tired (thanks a lot, underactive thyroid) and like most PhD students I’ve been paranoid that going out and doing something for an afternoon makes me a bad person who is doomed to fail. But one Sunday morning, rather than sitting slumped in front of my laptop madly planning my research schedule in different coloured pens (and not actually achieving anything, of course), I went outside, crossed the river, hit up the Tate Modern, then walked to Borough Market.

Spicy Fried Okra

About a year ago, I read about a little bar not too far from Leeds train station, called Bundobust, which served small Indian nibbly dishes. As part of our ongoing, but interrupted, culinary-veggie tour of Yorkshire eateries, I went to check out the place with my friend Caroline. Though we did that awkward thing of one of us waiting inside the restaurant, the other one waiting outside, when we finally found each other, we found that Bundobust served up some pretty good stuff, from pots of creamy black lentil dhal and rice, to the more interesting bundo chaat, a combination of samosa pastry, chickpeas, potato and relish. But the star was their okra fries, thin and crispy, in a chickpea batter, dusted with salt and mango powder.

Red Lentil Dahl

Everyone has at least one emergency recipe in their arsenal, even if it’s just frozen chips with cheese. When the cupboards are bare and it’s lunchtime, this is the one that I fall back on time and time again. It’s based on a recipe I saw a few years back in The Guardian by Yotam Ottolenghi (before he was famous, yeah?). Lots of budget foodstuffs like pigs ears and oxtails have recently been picked up by celebrity chefs and so thrown off their uncool reputations. Lentils, on the other hand, still bring to mind images of dingy 1970s bedsits and hippies. I’m not going to fight for their cause but I do always have some in the cupboard and they taste great in spicy soups or as sloppy rainy day meals like this! I make this recipe by memory and according to what doesn’t have a thin layer of mould on it in the fridge; the results are always slightly different but still tasty.