A Foodie First
Explore how Kohinoor’s Senior National Accounts Manager and avid foodie, Richard Hagar has developed his cooking skills and love for Indian food over the last year. Below Richard tells us all about his passion for dining and how he makes great use of our wide range of tasty products.
While many people think the process of cooking is a chore, I have always found it a way of relaxing – away from the busy work life.
It’s as easy to cook for 6 as it is to cook for 1 – so I enjoy cooking for other people. Whether it is a full on dinner party entertaining, or just cooking for my wife and me. I always try and add a personal touch to the dish.
When cooking a single dish, I will often scratch cook, for example, I’ll make my own pesto or Thai curry paste. When having a couple of people round I find increasingly that offering a mix of dishes goes down well. Everyone has their preferences: chicken, king prawns, pork, veggie, spicy, not so spicy and so on.
In the last year, I have decided to use the Kohinoor sauces and side dishes to help me serve up 4 or 5 options that guests can ‘dip’ into.
Recently I used the Bombay Egg curry sauce for the base of a vegetable mild curry – yes I ‘pimped’ it a bit. With this I used the Butter Chicken as the classic chicken offering, and accompanied it with a spicy King prawn Kolhapuri Masala. Everyone loved being able to have a bit of all 3, along with some easy chickpea sides and Dal Makhani.
The versatility of the sauces and sides gives you the ability to cook up a wide choice of dishes easily and conveniently, while always allowing you to add extra ingredients. Personally, I like it hot, so one of the dishes always has that extra chilli added, alongside some garlic butter and coriander. I always like to serve it with steamed Basmati rice.
Top tip
Use the Turkish absorption method of cooking the rice – perfect every time.
Wash the rice and then briefly sautee the clean rice in a bit of butter/oil. Then add 1 ½ times the amount of boiling water to rice, lid on and on a low heat to allow the rice to cook in the steam. Perfect basmati rice in 10 minutes.
