Real vindaloo, the Catholic Indian dish from Goa, is one of the best curries you can eat: soft pork simmered in a paste of garlic, fragrant spices, a touch of vinegar and, yes, a fair few red chilli peppers. But it doesn’t have to be blisteringly hot; the chillis involved are those long, dried ones, which are normally pretty tame. Unlike curry house ‘vindaloo’, the part they play is as much about colour and flavour as it is heat.

One downside of proper vindaloo is the time it takes to make. You need to marinade the meat overnight, and if you’re using pork shoulder (which you should), it’s going to need simmering for quite a few hours.

The good news is, there’s a stunning Goan fish dish called rechade, which uses a very similar paste, but takes a fraction of the time to make.

I made a version of it the other day, which I served with a crunchy apple and red onion salad, and I’m telling you, it was special. So, next barbeque, you know what to do.

Goan-spiced mackerel with apple and red onion salad

Ingredients

Two whole mackerel, gutted and cleaned

(For the marinade)
6 cloves
6 cardamom seeds (take them out of the pods)
2cm of cinnamon bark
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds
Half a teaspoon of ground turmeric
A big pinch of salt
6 fat cloves of garlic
6-8 long dried red chillis soaked for 15 mins in warm water and seeds removed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of sugar

(For the apple salad)
1 Braeburn apple, cored and finely diced
1 small red onion, finely diced
A pinch of salt
Half a small green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
A handful of finely chopped coriander leaf and stalks
The juice of a lime

Mix the red onion with a pinch of salt and set aside.

Grind the spices in a pestle and mortar, a coffee grinder or whatever you normally use, then add the mix to the rest of the marinade ingredients and blitz in a blender.

Take your gutted and cleaned mackerels and make diagonal slashes in the skin, on both sides, at 2 centimetre intervals.

Massage your marinade into the fish, making sure to get it right inside the cuts.

Next, add the rest of your salad ingredients to your salted onion and mix through.

Now, pan fry – or even better – barbeque your fish on a medium flame for about 5 minutes each side . Don’t worry if it chars a bit, that’s a good thing. Oh, and if you do fry it and there’s any leftover marinade in the pan, make sure you spoon that over the top of the fish.

Serve the mackerel straight away, with the apple salad on the side.

It was a chicken dhansak from the Shezan restaurant on Great Horton Road. I remember the waiter asking whether I wanted rice or something he called ‘chapattis’. I plumped for the latter. He could have brought me a pile of judges’ wigs and I wouldn’t have questioned it. Thankfully he didn’t, as that wouldn’t have worked with the cumin in the sauce.

Looking back, that dhansak was about as authentic as a shoddily blacked-up Uri Geller, miming to I Shot The Sheriff (the Eric Clapton version) with a broken tennis racket for a guitar. That’s right: it had pineapple in it. Nonetheless, at the time it was a stuff of wonderment.  Sour, sweet, spicy and thick with lentils, that meal changed my life. From that day to this, I have had an unhealthy obsession with eating and making curry.

Karahi Lamb with Chickpeas and Roasted Cumin

If you’ve ever been to one of the quality Pakistani eateries in the UK (places like Tayyabs and Lahore Kebab House in London) you’ll be familiar with the joys of karahi lamb: a dry, rich, dark curry cooked in a wok. I have eaten more than a few of these in my time, and over the years have developed my own version. Here it is.

You’ll need:

700 grams of boneless lamb shoulder cut into chunks.
3 tablespoons of vegetable oil.
1 small bulb of garlic, pureed.
1 tin of tomatoes, drained of juice and pureed.
2 teaspoons of whole cumin seeds.
2 teaspoons of ground coriander seeds.
1/4 of a teaspoon of turmeric.
1 teaspoon ground black pepper.
1 teaspoon of sea salt or 1/2 a teaspoon of table salt.
1/2 teaspoon of chilli power.
2 bay leaves.
1 tin of chickpeas, drained.
2 tablespoons of finely chopped coriander leaf.

First, roast your cumin seeds in a hot, dry pan until they smell like spicy toast. Shake into a pestle and mortar, grind and set aside.

Fry the garlic paste in hot vegetable oil for two minutes and then add the lamb pieces. Stir-fry over high heat until the lamb is brown.

Now drop in the ground coriander, turmeric, pepper, salt, chilli and bay leaves and mix. Keep mixing and frying for two minutes, then add the drained, pureed tomatoes, the chickpeas, and a pint of water.

Simmer on a low heat until the lamb is tender, which could be up to an hour. If within that time it looks like it might catch on the pan, add more water. Once the lamb is soft keep simmering until you have quite a dry sauce – one that just coats the lamb and chickpeas.

Take the wok off the heat, stir in the roasted cumin power, sprinkle with the chopped coriander leaves and serve with a stack of warmed shop-bought chapattis. Or if you prefer – a pile of judges’ wigs.