45: Chickpea and sweet potato curry, p102

Not the most appealing selection of ingredients, and definitely one to make T's toes curl... but this turned into a really rather tasty dish. This is one of the great things about this challenge - it's making me make recipes I wouldn't normally do, and surprising me with things like this. Who'd have thought (apart from an ardent curry-loving vegetarian...) that this would be greater than the sum of its parts?

I should have reduced the quantities, supposed to fed four as a main, with the other curry made tonight this served all four of us and left a good four lunches-worth for laters... Although perhaps the leftovers weren't a bad thing...

36: Chicken with mustard seed and coconut milk, p110

Another deceptive recipe title - this one is a lovely spicy, creamy chicken curry, with quite a kick to it! I reduced the quantities (a whole, jointed chicken, for a recipe serving three?), so used two red chillis instead of three, but it was still rather fiery. Gorgeous tumeric yellow sauce with chunks of red from the chillis and tomatoes, and dark green from the curry leaves. I used the legs/thighs/wings/the inner fillets from a whole chicken, saved the main breast meat for another day, and used the carcass to make a few bottles of good stock for the freezer (I use empty coke/juice bottles to store stock/thin soups in, fit nicely in the freezer and divides it up into c.500ml aliquots nicely). Apart from the fact there's only two of us, I couldn't fit a whole jointed chicken, plus all the other ingredients for this recipe, into my biggest casserole - a large Denby one. Nigel must have some pretty hefty dishes in his kitchen!