Showing posts with label how to. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how to. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 April 2012

Gujarati Recipe Series - Essential Spices

Any good Indian cook will have a 'dabba' (tin) of spices essential for making pretty much any curry from their region. My Mum gave me this tin when I moved out of home to go to university - unfortunately I wasn't a very good cook then (to put it kindly) so it didn't get used until years later when I got interested in cooking.


These are the spices that are used most often, there are also some others which you'll find in other tins - things like a few cloves, asafodeita, dried chillies, ground cumin instead of cumin seed. Black mustard seeds are one of my favourite ingredients and I use it in things other than Indian cooking, they are quite different to yellow mustard seeds, if your supermarket doesn't have them try your local Asian grocer or health food shop.

If you want to buy your own tin you can also find them in Asian grocers or have a snoop on ebay, there are lots on there! Once you've got all your spices, remember to replenish them every few months otherwise they tend to go stale and lose their punch.

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Monday, 17 March 2008

oxidizing silver - with eggs

So I had a go at oxidizing silver at the weekend. The total stingy person in me couldn't bear to put eggs on nice sterling silver but I tried it anyway!
I tried it with a couple of hard boiled eggs with two pairs of earrings, using this technique here

The victims:













The process:

Two hard boiled eggs, boil for about 15minutes.
Get a couple of sealable bags and put a pair in each, bash egg lightly with a wooden spoon or a small cup. Making sure the egg yolky goodness gets on to the metal. Til it looks like this:














I left mine in for about 3 hours, turning every hour or so and squishing the egg yolk closer around the earrings a bit more.
The findings - headpins and jumprings - oxidized quite quickly but the earwires were more of a pain and didn't really oxidize black.

Finished result:














Not bad for a first go, but I think I will try to source different earwires next time to get a better patina. The rest of the findings came out really well so I'm pleased with those.

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