Anjum Anand teaches novice cooks how to cook delicious, healthy Indian food.
Anjum attempted to show her friend Panthea, who can't cook, how easy it is to prepare a flavourful feast based on grilled kebabs and wraps. Once Panthea had mastered the art of the samosa, Anjum persuaded her to help out on a stall at the quintessentially English Sherborne Country Fair. Here they hoped their wraps made with chicken tikka, tandoori lamb, and the vegetarian option, paneer, mushroom and spinach would be more than a match for burgers.
Anjum persuaded her old university friend, Alex, to prepare an Indian feast rather than buy a takeaway for his boys’ night in. The guests were treated to a chilli-themed selection with Spiced lamb burgers made with a wonderful combination of green chillies, garlic, ginger and coriander, and mouth-watering pieces of Oven-fried chilli chicken steeped in a chilli and ginger marinade served with Smashed-fried potatoes spiced up with a little red chilli powder. The dishes were great for the lads to tuck into while they watched the FA Cup Final.
Anjum set out to prove that Indian food can be light and healthy and worthy of a slot on the menu at a spa. She headed to the spa in the beautiful surroundings of the Charlton House hotel in Somerset where she persuaded the chef, Elisha Carter, to put some of her recipes on his menu. He loved her mouth-watering Avial (a southern Indian mixed vegetable dish with coconut) accompanied by a slightly sweet Bengal gram lentil curry, followed by the yoghurt-based dessert made with saffron, Shrikand.
This week Anjum visited a fire station in Essex. The daily diet of beans on toast or a takeaway was replaced with a curry when Anjum showed firefighter Paul Pemberton how to cook a proper curry for the 'blue watch'. Anjum explained to Paul what type of pans to use to cook a curry and why coriander is such a vital ingredient in Indian food, then showed him how to make an aubergine dish cooked with yoghurt. They also made a lamb curry with green chillies accompanied by naan bread.
Anjum headed to Cornwall to help self-taught chefs, Nirmal and Louis, who run the Little Cornish Curry Company, to face a new challenge. The pair were about to start cooking for a curry night at a local pub and had decided to attempt to convert customers from traditional fish and chips to Indian food by serving a different kind of fish dish. Anjum showed them how to make a coconut fish curry with yellow lemon rice and a side order of crab cakes garnished with tangy tamarind mayonnaise.
Anjum threw a party in her garden and checked on the progress of the people she taught how to cook Indian dishes during the series. Her friend Alex cooked the classic side dish of Paneer with spinach; Elisha, the chef at the Charlton House hotel, made a Wild mushroom pilaff; while firefighter Paul tried his hand at Peshwari naan. Anjum made them a summer feast with Raan, a spiced roast leg of lamb, as her centrepiece.
