Displaying items by tag: spices

If dining in is the new dining out then The Spice Pioneer subscription box will be a great success. Members receive a spice box each month in the post which includes a menu plan and recipes.  Enough to impress your friends and create a dinner party for four people. There's a postcard from the place that inspired the menu (each month is a surprise and travels the culinary world) and a link to a music playlist to set the scene while you are cooking and dining. The spices are provided for a starter, main course and side dish or a dessert. I've been sent the aromatic Moroccan box and the spicy Sri Lankan box to try, both with easy to follow and inspiring recipes. The quality of the spices is really very good, and for those of you out there unlikely to have a store cupboard with the selection required to cook amazing curries and spicy dishes, then this is the answer. You do need to go and buy the main ingredients but the shopping list is concise and easy to snap on your phone camera. Nothing complicated to search for with all the Moroccan box ingredients found in Lidl and the Sri Lankan ingredients all from Asda.

• Chicken tagine with apricots ginger and ras el hanout from Morocco
• Orange and date salad with preserved lemon and pomegranate molasses from Morocco
• Spicy green beans and black mustard seed from Sri Lanka
• Sri Lankan monkfish curry
• Beetroot curry - really very good and I would never have thought of making this before
• The spice box and ingredients purchased actually fed 6 of us.
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At the Menta Trade Fair and Food and Drink Expo at Ickworth today we tasted various offerings but our favourite was the curry from 'Our House of Spice'. Two lovely sisters, Nadia and Julia, who make ready meal curries and spices you can cook with at home. Lovely presentation, hot food to try and smiling faces to sell it. You can find them on their facebook page or contact them by e mail on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We would have tweeted it there and then but there wasn't any internet at this trade fair...derrrrrrr.

It might be nearly two hours from here but the food is worth it. Bobbys is a Leicester institution. The best home-made samosas - deep fried on the spot, an all you can eat buffet with no meat in sight, a Thali for one to take home which includes three types of vegetable curry, a dhal, rice, puri and pickles and actually serves two, and all this for under £20. I've been going here for twenty five years, and in the picture is Bobby himself!