What a lucky girl I am, two review posts in one day and this one is particularly special. Not only am I posting this for a blog tour, it’s not my usual kind of book review and I’m really quite excited about it. I hope to do more of these in the future.

Book 📖

Firstly, thank you to everyone at @literallypr for inviting me to take part in this tour, everyone I have spoken to there has been fantastic. Not only did I get a copy of a PDF version of Curry Compendium, they treated me to a hardback copy also which is absolutely beautiful. Curry Compendium was published on 10th September 2021 and you can get a copy here.

Description 🔖

This is the definitive guide to creating British Indian Restaurant cuisines in the comfort of your own home. During lockdown, lots of people started to try and replicate their favourite restaurant dishes themselves and this book is everything you need to give you the inspiration to do just that with British Indian recipes.

General Thoughts 🤔

Let me start by saying that I absolutely love Indian food. I have travelled to India and eaten authentic food there, but I also adore British Indian food; which is different. Getting a takeaway on a Friday or Saturday night is a British tradition and Indian is my favourite takeaway to get. So to have the option to create those kind of flavoursome and tasty meals at home is very exciting to me.

I’ll also be clear that I am not the cook in my household. My partner loves cooking and does the majority of it, but when I got this book, I wanted to lock myself away in the kitchen and get on by myself. The recipes have ignited something in me and I’ve been spending a LOT of time over my stove and putting fantastic meals on the table.

I would highly advise reading the beginning of this book before diving straight into the individual recipes. I learnt a lot about base gravy and other things by doing so which I think made cooking the recipes easier and gave me some context as to why I was doing what I was doing. It’s also really interesting.

I loved that each recipe included a link to a YouTube video showing the recipe being cooked. Although I am fine with following written instructions, it was so helpful to have the option of a visual guide as well. I found myself flicking between the two.

I’ve tried a couple of the recipes now and they’ve both been amazing. Really easy to follow, clear and precise which is everything I need in a good recipe. The final product tasted amazing and as a non-cook I had a huge sense of pride (sad I know). We’re veggies in our household so I just switched out the meat for potatoes and mushrooms and it worked really well.

Both my partner and I were so impressed with how tasty these meals were and the depth of flavour. It truly was like eating a takeaway that was cooked in our own kitchen. What I particularly liked was that there was considerably less grease in the curries than what we usually get from a restaurant as that does sometimes put me off a little bit.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖️

I cannot recommend this book enough. If you love British Indian food and whether you’re a beginner or advanced in the kitchen, I think that you would learn a lot from this book. I’m grateful to this book for lighting a fire under me and inspiring me to try new things in the kitchen. Can’t wait to get stuck into plenty more of the fabulous recipes within the book.

😍😍😍😍😍