The meal in question was at Benares. It was my mum’s birthday and I found an amazing deal on Keynoir for cocktails and canapés for two. With a lot of these deals you turn up only to find you’re choosing from a totally different menu to everyone else (also it’s still normally pretty good food) – not so with Benares. The cocktail menu was extensive and there were loads of different options with an Indian influence, I’ve had the chutney martini before and it is very nice indeed – in fact at some point I’m going to have to experiment myself and report back!
The bit I want to write about this time though is the food
and specifically the five spiced pickled prawns canapé. Now I’m not normally a fan of prawns, I was a
vegetarian in a former life (age 12-18) and it has had the unfortunate effect
of making me very conscious of body parts when eating anything that still looks
quite like it did when it was alive. It’s
not the look of the thing but more the texture when you bite through it. Anyway I was completely expecting not to like
eating this giant prawn – especially when I picked it up and found it was
chilled rather than hot as I had assumed.
However it was one of the tastiest and most interesting things I’ve
eaten in quite I while. I say
interesting not just because I can’t describe to you what it tasted like –
although I can’t! – but because the flavours worked together so well that I couldn’t
tell one from the other.
After eating this meal I’ve made it my next task to learn
more about Indian cooking. I can already
cook a basic curry thanks to my mother and a Jamie Oliver recipe that I cut out
of a magazine a few years back but I know very little about the spices and
other flavours that go into a curry in their raw form.
I am now on the hunt for recommendations for good Indian cookbook
from which I can steal ideas from!
Btw sorry about the lack of pictures in this first entry – I stupidly left my phone in my coat pocket so it was sat in the cloak room for all the time I was stuffing my face!
