There is nothing like a good curry on a cold day especially when it’s been given time to soak in all of the flavours and really capture the senses with the aroma…this was my thinking on Wednesday. Last week I had purchased a few of the Nice ‘n Spicy products and they have been sitting on my kitchen counter willing me to give them a go. So, feeling all industrious, I duly wrote my shopping list and went off to purchase the required meat, potatoes etc.

My husband and I are currently doing the first half of the first year of Bible School. This means that most Thursday evenings we are having lectures. When I get home late, starting to cook a meal is just not an option for me so we usually end up getting a ridiculous amount of Mcdonalds (we’re starving by that time of the evening) and heading home for a fat and salt saturated dinner.

Enough is enough! So here I go with my forward planning (happens every now and then) and decide to try a Mild Cape Curry. Make it on Wednesday, put it in the fridge overnight, cook some rice and start warming the curry again before going off to Bible School, and by the time we get home it takes 5 minutes and we have a fairly healthy meal for dinner. What a good homemaker I am…..:)

I am not the kind of cook who will just throw a few things together and see what happens. I like to have a recipe to work from and I will stick to it 100%. I’m not a brave cook by any means and any experimentation is done with much trepidation. (One day I’ll tell you about the time I made my grandmother’s curry for 15 people. My first entertainment disaster!) So these Nice ‘n Spicy packs are ideal for me. They have all of the spices prepackaged in the right amounts and order and the recipe is on the back (see picture below).

You can buy this range from most Checkers or Pick ‘n Pay type shops. My mum has used them for years, with her own tweaking, and she makes a mean curry!

So here’s me all confidence. The recipe calls for lamb, but as my husband is not a fan of lamb, I decided to use beef. I didn’t realise that he actually doesn’t like any meet on the bone, unlike me who likes to suck the marrow out of the bones. Oh well, mental note for next time. This was the sum total of my recipe tweaking.

It wasn’t until now that I realised how different a Malay style curry is compared to an Indian style curry. My mother spent many years in Durban. (An old Indian lady once told me: “Durban, India – same place”) Thus, I grew up on very mild Indian style curries, so this curry was a complete flavour adventure for me.

It contains dried peaches and I used vinegar instead of tamarind as I didn’t know when I would next use tamarind and didn’t want it sitting in my fridge for months and months. On tasting the curry on Wednesday, before putting it in the fridge, I was quite concerned – it tasted nothing like how I thought a curry should taste. With a quick prayer for it to be tasty, I put it in the fridge. It had a fruity tang to it. Very nice, if that’s the flavour you are expecting.

Well, we had it for supper last night and there is still about half of it left. It was very yummy. Mentally I still battled with it being a curry, but it was very tasty. I made Jasmine rice (because that’s what we had in the cupboard), but I would use basmati or brown rice in future.

Nothing extravagant, but fairly quick and easy and something that you can make days in advance and put it in the fridge or freeze it in easy to defrost portions. You can even make a large pot of rice and freeze it together with rice so that your whole meal is done and dusted for the next time you don’t feel like cooking.

I’m now off to look for something to make for this evening. It’s forecast to be a rather wintery weekend so I’m thinking of a nice mushroom soup and crusty bread. Bring on the recipe books!

Nice 'n Spicy Mild Cape Curry