Our recent forrays into these two books were great, but we didn’t get to a couple of recipes that we’d planned. Firstly was Dishoom’s brilliant House Daal. I first had this type of black daal at Bukhara in Delhi well over ten years ago. Bukhara ranks as one of the top restaurants in Asia, and the daal I ate there lives long in my memory as one of the most magical tastes in my life. At Bukhara, it is slow-cooked over 24 hours in a tandoor, and at Dishoom, they do something similar. However, it’s a 4-5 hour exercise for the home cook. We didn’t get the texture of the lentils quite right – a little longer in the first stage of cooking to get the lentils soft with the slightest bite would have been perfect. The daal, once cooked, is then finished with garlic, ginger, tomato purée and cream. It was a real food memory, and we’re going to try it again soon – perhaps trying a tin of lentils rather than the 4-5 hour cook (sacrilegious, I know).

We also tried another recipe from Tom Kerridge’s book – The Hand and Flowers Cookbook. His take on Moules Marrinere looked fantastic, and we bought a whipped cream maker to help make the Guinness espuma that sits on top of them. His take on moules is really interesting because after cooking the mussels with white wine, he shells them and combines them with a hollandaise sauce with some small diced vegetables to form the basis of the dish. Sadly, our Guinness espuma was a little too bitter for the delicious mussel mixture it topped. We use bottled Guinness rather than draft, which I suspect is what they use at the Hand and Flowers, and perhaps a can of Guinness or even a sweeter stout such as Mackeson may work even better for the home cook. We tried his treacle bread which was designed to go with the moules. This bread was delicious but needs a little work to get it perfect, as I’m not sure the flour we used was quite right. It’s worth trying again as the flavour was great, reminiscent of the outstanding soda bread we had at Richard Corrigan’s restaurants!

You win some and lose some in the navigation along the shelves, but the fun is in trying and picking up some new ideas.