Satay chicken and noodles

This is another one of my bachelor creations. My girlfriend Zoe serves me raw food creations only so I have to cook for myself sometimes. So I take a shortcut and combine commercial preparations to make something different. And the creation below is VERY tasty -- plus being very filling and probably reasonably nutritious.

The three ingredients are below, a small paper bucket of noodles, a Satay flavour sachet and a can of shredded chicken. Yes. It even includes actual chicken -- sort of. Though it is mainly a noodle dish.

The noodles are fine ones so I crush them with my hands into a bowl. So I then have a bowl of noodle crumbs. I then tip on top of them the two small sachets that come with them in the bucket plus the Satay sachet, plus the contents of the can of chicken.

I then pour boiling water over the lot and use a spoon to mix the contents of the bowl together as well as I can. I measure the amount of boiling water with the bucket. I fill the bucket to about three quarters full and use that amount

I then put the contents into the microwave for one minute, take the bowl out, again mix the contents, then give it another minute in the microwave. I then set it aside for 10 minutes. That ten minutes is actually part of the cooking. The noodles will soak up the remaining water during that time -- resulting in a big bowl of noodle porridge. It is easy to eat and Yum! You can eat it with a soup spoon

Chicken thighs in hoisin peanut paste

Recipe by Matt Preston. Jenny made this for me recently and it was Yum

(1 cup) salted peanuts
230 ml (1 cup) hoisin sauce
3 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoons salt flakes
8 chicken thighs fillets, at room temperature
1 very large handful of chopped Asian herbs (Thai basil, Vietnamese mint or coriander in any combination)

Preheat the oven to 200øC and lightly oil a baking tray. Using a food processor. stand mixer or stick blender, blitz the peanuts until they become a fine meal. Add the hoisin sauce, vinegar, salt and a little warm water, if needed to loosen.

Tip into a large mixing bowl, add the chicken pieces and rub them all over with the paste. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the paste is all dark and bubbling. You can always give them a quick blast under the grill at the end to create those dark bits.

Scatter the fresh herbs onto the chicken and serve with sauteed Asian greens or a crunchy Asian salad.

NOTE: If you use a suitable brand of hoisin sauce (like Changs), this recipe is gluten free.

Blending ready-made food

We live in an era of dinners and other food prepared for us by businesses of various sorts. There are full frozen dinners available and components of dinners. So our basic ingredients for food preparation have stretched out way further than the basic meat, beans and potato (etc.)

But we can still be creative to some extent -- by modifying the commercial product. And one of my favourite dinners -- a soup as a meal -- is such a blend.

I start out with a large container of a very hearty chicken Laksa soup. It is a reasonable meal by itself. There is a lot in it. But it is still a bit bland in taste. So I add a sachet of Satay chicken soup base and blend the two. I end up with a soup that is both hearty and flavoursome. The blend is much more tasty and filling than either component alone. I have it often.

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A food surprise

Because I do not have a live-in partner, I often have to prepare meals for myself -- so I rely a lot on frozen dinners and canned food. They are usually quite passable these days but none reach any kind of gourmet standard.

I can be lucky, however. For my lunch yesterday I ate very well. I had a thick Laksa soup which was excellent followed by a Tasmanian pork pie that was very tasty too. Not quite a gourmet lunch but definitely a good one.

An Achar Gosht variation

Indian shops have a masala called Achar Gosht -- "pickle curry", originally meant for use with mutton

I have made up curries from it as per the instructions on the packet and found it quite good.  I made my own variation on it tonight, however,  which in my view was much better.  It was a very tasty curry, though a bit on the "hot" side.

I poured a can of diced tomatoes into a big frypan, added an equal amount of water, a chopped up onion, a good sprinkle of salt, a dessert spoon of ground ginger, the WHOLE packet of masala and 500g of mince meat (ground beef).  So it was low-fat cookery, with the only fat being whatever was in the beef, and the beef was described as "lean".

So I mixed everything in together as far as I could and cooked it on a fairly low heat for half an hour.

Shortly before the curry was ready to be served, I mixed in a mini-can (125g) of corn kernels and a mini-can of baked beans -- just to give the meal some variation in texture.  I served it with boiled rice.

The result was delish! Simple, low-fat and delish. That has got to be good! It was probably even gluten-free.

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A Cumquat Daiquiri

The Cumquat is a marvellous bush.  Grown widely outside its native place in Southern China, it is basically a warm climate tree but as an onamental bush it is grown in much cooler places -- such as Sydney and Copenhagen. A large part of its visual appeal is its bright yellow fruit, which look like mini-oranges and which the tree puts out prolifically twice a year.

Sadly, however, people mostly ignore the fruit as a food source because it has an appealing but strong taste -- rather bitter.  The one thing the fruit is used for is to make a jam -- and Cumquat jam is the best marmalade you ever tasted.  Once you have had Cumquat jam on your toast, you will never buy another marmalade.

Brisbane is a rather warm place so my cumquat tree is around 10' tall now -- having been planted only about 10 years ago.  And it is in season now at the begining of spring.  I couldn't see all those bright yellow fruit go to waste so I decided to make a Daiquiri out of them.

Daiquiris are a popular tropical cocktail.  Their basic recipe is some form of citrus plus LOTS of sugar, served cold.  The citrus is usually lime or lemon but there are also such abominations as strawberry Daiquiris. In my youth I used to use grapefruit for the citrus juice, which made a REALLY strong drink. I believe Hemingway used grapefruit too. There are several things you can do to get maximum sugar into the drink but the simplest is to use Caster sugar, which is what I use.

So I harvested some of my Cumquat crop and juiced them on my citrus juicer.  It took a while.  Because they are so small, you have to juice a lot of them to get much juice.  But I persevered, added caster sugar until it no longer dissolved plus vodka and topped up with cold soda water.  It was a unique and very refreshing drink.  If you have access to a Cumquat tree, you know what to do now.

When I was at the Uni of NSW in Sydney, the library used to have ornamental Cumqat shrubs outside it. The fruit was unmistakeable. It nomally just fell to waste so I used to go around at night and harvest all the ripe fruit. Nobody seemed to mind.  They didn't know what a treasure they had.

Incidentally, in the Philippines they have a hybrid Cumquat tree called a Calamansi. It is probably a hybrid with a Mandarin.   They use it routinely there to make a fruit juice drink.  It has the unique Cumquat taste without the bitterness. You can even get it in cans.

Kaimak, a discovery

When I lived in Sydney, I would usually have Yugoslav food about once a week. I would usually order pola pola -- half Raznici and half Cevapcici.  The Cevapcici -- a type of meatball -- were particularly good.  So I was dismayed when I came to Brisbane and  found NO Yugoslav restaurants.

But you can occasionally buy from a continental smallgoods shop or Woolworths trays of cevapi -- skinless sausages -- which you can cook up yourself. Cevapi and Cevapcici see to be just different shapes of the same thing.  So all was well. I could cook up my own Cevapi, and I do.

But all was not quite well.  With cevaps you always have Kaimak, a type of sour cream.  And ordinary sour cream is NOT as good as Kaimak.  A cevap meal is always good and tasty but it is not the same without Kaimak.  And there seemed to be no solution to that.  So I just had to do without Kaimak

But Lo!  I have discovered a product that is very much like Kaimak.  And it will certainly do me in lieu of Kaimak.  It is a product of Bulla, a private Victorian dairy company.  It is called "Spreadable Feta with Greek style garlic and herbs". It comes in small tubs and also makes a nice dip with cracker biscuits.  Woolworths have it.

Let me be clear (as 0bama used to say when he wasn't) I DON'T think the Bulla product is as good as Kaimak but I think it is the best substitute for those of us living in the benighted depths of the Anglosphere

UPDATE

I am a Jonah.  The Bulla product has now disappeared.  Nearly as good, however is Philadelphia spreadable cream cheese with garden herbs and onion twist

I do of course have a recipe for real kaimak but it takes days to produce a result and I am too impatient for that

"Chicken tonight"

There is a well-known story in the family about the time when Von went to cook the first meal for herself and her husband Simon.  Von hadn't had much experience with cooking so she decided to take a shortcut.  She saw on the supermarket shelf a bottle of stuff called "Chicken Tonight".  It was advertised a bit at that time so  she decided it to use it to create a chicken dinner.

It was a disaster.  The meal was so bad that Simon decided there and then that he would have to do all the cooking. And he still does. Von prefers gardening so that was OK with her.

So I have always steered clear of that stuff -- on the grounds that I am a pretty crook cook too.  But a little while ago I mentioned the matter to my brother and mentioned that I avoided the stuff. He replied rather sharply that there was nothing wrong with it and he makes it often.

He and I see eye to eye on most things so I had a rethink.  Next time I saw the product on sale I bought a bottle.  And just recently I used it. I cheated a bit though.  I just chopped up two chicken breasts, tossed them into my crockpot (slow cooker) and tipped the "Chicken tonight" gloop in after them.  And two hours  later, the meal was pretty good.  I even drank all the soup at the bottom of the crockpot.  Yummy!

An English curry

On Friday I made a last attempt to get some goodness out of Keen's curry powder, a type of masala.  Keen's was a fixture in every home in my youth.  It WAS curry. But I have never been able to get much taste out of it in my cookery.  So on Friday I tossed a whole tinfull of it into my crockpot with some diced chicken, tomatoes, carrots, celery and sultanas. And that worked.  What came out was a curry of sorts, quite passable.  Anne even had some kind words about it.  I will use only Indian masalas in future, however.

Griffo's "Pik a hot Pak"

About 55 years ago when I was about 20, I had a job selling transmission machinery from a shop in George St., Brisbane. It rather strangely had 3 names: Gearco, Irvine's and Munro Machinery. That is such a strange job for a literary type like me that I think I should say a few words about how I got that job.

There were not many jobs advertised in the local paper for experts in Middle-English poetry -- which is what I knew most about -- so with supreme optimism I applied for job as an engineering equipment salesman.

I was interviewed by Harry Beanham, who owned a chain of similar shops in other capital cities. I turned up for the interview in a green suit wearing a green fuzzy felt hat. That was not a good move. But Harry was a cautious man so he just asked me two questions which should have sent me on my way. He asked: What is a tap and what is a reamer? Being a country kid I answered both questions correctly. And if you think a tap is something you get water out of you don't know engineering machinery. Harry was so delighted to meet a kid who actually knew something that he gave me the job straight away.

And I vindicated his faith in me.  At one stage I made a big sale of diehead chasers  -- which are sort of complicated things.  Apparently none of Harry's other people were selling diehead chasers so Harry gathered together his whole stock of them and sent them up to Brisbane for me to sell.  In his mind I became the diehead chaser man.  Which actually served me well on a later occasion.  But that's another story.

Anyway, while I was working there in the shop, most people in the area seemed to know of a Greek cafe nearby called "Griffo's".  And people flocked there to buy a lunch called "Pik a hot pak".  It was yummy.  It was basically a toasted bacon & egg sandwich but with other stuff in it as well. At that time in my life I was busy saving money so my lunch was usually a cheese and pickle sandwich that I brought from home.  But the Griffo's product was so attractive that I did splash out on one at times.

Sadly, however, Griffo's eventually vanished, as so much does over the years. As one gets older, however, one does tend to reminisce about "the good ol' days" a lot and the memory of Griffo's came to me recently.  So I decided that I would try to recreate a "Pik a hot pak".  I am of course not sure how close I got to the original but the taste is at least pretty similar -- and super-yummy.

So what's in it?  The first constraint was that it had to contain pretty familiar ingredients.  Any "foreign muck" would not have been well received in Brisbane of that era.  So I used absolutely routine breakfast and lunch ingredients as I knew them at that time.  So it is something that any cafe would be able to put together for you to this day.

It is simply bacon, fried egg, cheese, sliced tomato and fried onion topped by a small dab of tomato sauce all piled together into an ordinary toasted white-bread sandwich and cut into four. My local cafe puts it together well for me and it's the best toasted sandwich I have ever had!  So some long overdue thanks to Griffo's.

Warning:  If you try it you could become addicted!

A crockpot curry

My week started out well. Joe is in Sydney so on Monday I cooked up an Achar Gosht Keema for Kate and Jenny. That's curried mince in plain English.  I got a packet of Achar Gosht masala (curry powder) from an Indian shop and tipped the whole of it into 500g of semi-fatty mince plus a can of tomatoes and some celery.  And the result was quite tasty.  We had it with rice, raita and chutney.  You need a bit of fat in a curry to carry the flavour.

A minceburger?

Is there such a thing as a minceburger?  If not, I must have invented it.  I had some savoury mince (ground beef) that I wanted to use up so, for dinner, I bought two hamburger rolls, put plenty of butter and a cheese slice on each and topped each with a thick coat of mince.   It was delish.  But it depends on the mince of course.  Your mileage may vary.

Barley

A new taste sensation! Last night I had a dinner that I had never tasted before. I have been eating out off and on since I was 16 and I am now 73 so it is rare to find a dinner that is new to me. I have eaten much from all the world's cuisines. I have had Chinese food in Hong Kong, Philippine food in the Philippines, Mexican food in Mexico, South African food in South Africa, French food in France, Indian food in India and Indian food in England (don't mention English food). And during my 15 years in Sydney just about all the world's foods were available right there anyway. So I was surprised to encounter a taste I had not had before

It all began when I somehow noted that people in Northern Europe grow and eat a lot of barley. I had never had anything made from barley. So I bought some. And I wandered around the net looking for barley recipes. I found one that looked promising. But it looked a bit complicated for me to make so I put off making it. Eventually I told Anne that I was going to cook some barley for our next dinner. She was amused. She was even more amused when she saw the recipe. "You'll never make that!", she said. She knows that most of my cookery is just heating up something already prepared by the chefs at Woolworths.

So in the kindness of her heart Anne offered to make it for me. There was clearly a lot of time and work in the recipe so I gladly accepted her offer.

And I have just had the result. It was very good. On the plate it looked rather like savoury mince but the taste was quite different: Not a strong taste; a subtle taste but very more-ish. I am going to be asking Anne for more of it. I got the recipe off the barley organization so I imagine I might be getting some free barley soon if Google leads them to this post.

The recipe is below. Anne used pork mince and cut up the mushrooms finely. The recipe says "cooked barley" without explanation so Anne soaked it in for half a day and then boiled it until it was soft. Anne was surprised about the amount of salt but it was OK. Despite what the food freaks say, salt is good for you.

Barley Mushroom Stroganoff

Family favorite with a twist.

1 pound lean ground turkey, chicken
or beef
2 teaspoons olive oil
3/4 cup chopped onion
8 ounces sliced fresh mushrooms
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon chicken seasoning base
2 cups low-fat sour cream
1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
2 cups cooked pearl barley*
Chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Spray large skillet with non-stick cooking
spray; heat over medium heat. Add ground
turkey; crumble and cook until turkey is no
longer pink. Remove from pan and drain.
Pour off liquid from pan. Add olive oil,
onion and mushrooms; saut‚ 4 to 5 minutes,
stirring occasionally. Season with oregano,
salt and pepper. Cook 4 more minutes. Stir
in water and chicken seasoning. Blend
together sour cream and flour. Stir in sour
cream mixture, cooked barley and meat.
Continue to cook over low heat until heated
through. Garnish with parsley, if desired,
and serve.

Makes 8 servings.

Pie technology

Australians are great lovers of meat (steak) pies. and of course we prefer freshly baked ones -- at around $4 each.

But in most supermarkets you can get a pack of 4 pies for $4.  So what are THEY  like?

An odd feature of them is that they are microwave friendly.  Heat up a freshly baked pie in the microwave and the pastry comes out soggy.  But put one or two of your $1 pies into a microwave for 4 minutes and they come out about right.  By contrast, put a $1 pie in a conventional oven and they come out with "cast-iron" shells.

So the great discovery about frozen supermarket pies is the exact opposite to the wisdom about fresh pies.  Microwave them! In the microwave, the crust softens and makes a perfectly nice pie.  Not a great pie but pleasant enough.

I have had a couple recently accompanied by a few pickles: Cucumbers, Manzanilla stuffed olives and cocktail onions

A hearty salad

A hearty salad?  What the devil is that? Salads are supposed to be rabbit food!  They're not hearty.  Mine are.  They're almost a meal in themselves.  So I thought I might share the concept.

I also call the salad I mostly make a simple salad, as it is usually just four ingredients chopped and thrown together without even the blessing of a dressing.

For two people:

Chop one tomato into wedges
Chop one Lebanese cucumber into thick slices
Chop contents of an avocado into substantial slices
Chop enough Feta cheese to make about a dozen small chunks

Toss together in a bowl and serve

Optionally:  Add Manzanilla olives, anchovies or chopped capsicum (Bell pepper)

I am very heretical in that I don't use lettuce, other leaves or onion in my salads.  Lettuce has no nutritional value and, if you use onions, a salad dressing is required (in my opinion).  Raw onion is a bit harsh.

I have and have used salad dressing in the past but I am against it these days.  It tends to mask the flavours of the salad ingredients.  And, if what you are are using is reasonably fresh, the usual salad ingredients have a great taste of their own.  And I now like to taste that without distractions.

Cucumber magic

When you eat out somewhere and order a salad with your meal,  you normally get some cucumber with it.  As it happens I REALLY like cucumber, particularly if it is not long off the vine.  But the salad you get in restaurants is obviously cut up by people who DON'T like cucumber.  It is cut up into such thin slices that you get almost no cucumber taste from them at all.

And I have been experimenting with that.  I make a lot of salads these days and cucumber features in most of them. And what I have found is that the bigger the slice of cucumber, the more you get that great cucumber taste.  And if you have never experienced a great cucumber taste, I suspect that you need to find a better greengrocer.

I slice my cucumbers diagonally, as most restaurants do.  Just cutting them into circles is uncool.  And I cut the slices at least a quarter of an inch thick.  For children of the metric era that is about 1 centimeter (I think).  A slice of cucumber should be a delicious lump!

Enjoy!

Food review

When I was on the weight-loss diet that Joe prescribed for me last year I more or less had to cook for myself to keep inside my 1500 calorie allowance.  Joe prescribed grilled chicken as an evening meal but that got too bland after just two nights.  So I chopped the chicken up, added canned tomatoes and curry powder and threw it into my crockpot with a bit of onion -- and cooked it there for about 3 hours.  That was an improvement but not by a lot.  It was still pretty bland.  The curry powders I was using were local ones like Keens and Clive of India and I found that I had to put half the container of powder into the dinner to get much taste out of it.

So after a while I went to a local Indian grocer and got some real Indian curry powder -- such as Achar Gosht. It still didn't make a great curry, however. A good curry is fatty and I was trying to avoid that. So no added ghee or marrow-bones etc. So I ate a lot of rather basic curries last year. But I like curries! And, like Joe, I am not bothered by having the same thing night after night.

As you do, I eventually went off my diet so had to rethink my food.

Partly because I don't like driving at night anymore, and partly because I felt I needed to give Nandos, KFC, McDonalds, Chinese and Lebanese restaurants and such places a bit of a rest (splendid though their offerings are -- Sing Sing Chinese restaurant at Buranda gives a very nice Vietnamese lemon grass chicken dinner for only $13.99), I decided that I should mostly ditch going out for dinner and instead prepare my own meals at home. My first step in that direction was to buy frozen dinners. So all I had to do was pop them in the microwave. And that was very successful. The frozen dinners I get from Woolworths seem to me pretty much as good as what I would get from a restaurant. Over time they have really improved.

Then I moved on to things that just had to be heated up in my gas oven -- pizzas, pies etc.  And that worked pretty well.  I just followed the instructions on the label about how long to heat the product and that mostly worked out fine.  I did rather overcook a pizza once but most of it was OK. It was "good in parts", to quote an old joke

Recently, however, I have been tempted by "assisted" cookery -- where some packet or other says:  "Just add meat" -- or the like. The idea is that some corporate chef has put together some  flavouring substances into a sachet or bottle and that takes care of all the thinking, talent and creativity.  And it works.  Anne politely eats my creations of that sort and has always found them acceptable. I have made some reasonable curries by just adding a bottle of sauce to mince.  Mr Patak of Lancashire is a particularly good provider of such bottles.

 My best effort of that kind was a chili con carne.  I just added a can of diced tomato plus a can of beans to 500g of good beef mince and left it to the oven and the flavour sachet to do all the work.  And Anne actually praised that creation.  A problem, however, is that both Woolworths and Aldi seem to be sold out of Chili con Carne sachets so if anyone reading this sees some on sale somewhere local I would appreciate the information

And I have just now dived deeper into complexity.  I bought a packet which described itself as a  "Tandaco one-pan dinner" with savoury noodles.  The packet contained a sachet of noodles and a flavour sachet.  It was a product to which I had to add measured quantities of a few things -- not just meat.  I had to add onion, garlic, Oyster sauce and curry powder.  Rather daringly, I added Achar Gosht for the curry powder.  The recipe was probably designed around Keens or the like.

And the result was quite good.  It was a pleasant taste but not like any other taste that I could describe.  A catch, however, was that the recipe produced rather a lot of food.  When it says on a packet "serves 4" I generally discount that and expect it to feed only two.  But this time the claim was spot-on.  It took me four days to eat it all!  So that worked out at less than $3 per dinner, which is very reasonable.

So that is where I am up to at the moment.  I have just bought myself a special pancake frying pan and a packet of pancake mix so strange things could happen soon.

Cheese quest


When I was helping to bring up kids many moons ago, computer games like Kings Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest etc were all the rage.  My present quest is obviously much less important than that but it has some importance to me.

Going back further: When I was a kid in the '40s and '50s there was no variation in what cheese we ate.  It was always Kraft cheddar cheese in the blue packet and with the silver foil inside.  That it didn't need refrigeration even in the tropics was probably part of its appeal.  And I don't think our household was much different from any other at the time.  I think Australia had something of a cheese monoculture at that time.

As time went by however, the available types of cheese proliferated -- and Kraft cheddar faded from view.  But the variety did not conquer all.  What happened was that a new monoculture arose: "Tasty" cheese arose to rule the roost.

And like a good Australian, I too for many years mainlined on Tasty.  Recently, however, I have looked outside my rut a bit and have tried some other cheeses.  And as part of looking more widely, I wondered if you could still get the old Kraft cheddar.  Rather to my surprise I found that I could.  My local Woolworths has it in a small corner down the bottom of one of its shelves.

So I wondered how it matched up against more modern cheeses.  I bought a packet. And it was still quite pleasant but a bit bland.  It goes very well as grilled cheese on toast however.  So Kraft cheddar was the beginning but not the end of my quest.

Other cheeses I have tried include Club Cheddar from the Mary Valley (Queensland) -- with pickled onion in it -- and Cracker Barrel black label.  The Onion cheese has the best taste in my view but both are a bit too crumbly for me.

So my quest continues. Is there a cheese with a strong cheesy flavour that is not crumbly?

A diet curry

Most people on a weight-loss diet are told to cut back heavily on consumption of fats.  So you can't fry your meat anymore and have to have it grilled.  That can get pretty boring.  So what about currying your meat to give it a bit more flavor? Sadly, most restaurant curries and curry sauces are a fat bomb.  Their high fat content means that you have to avoid them like the plague.  And curries are so fat dependent that taking the fat out leaves you with very little flavor.  So by trial and terror I have arrived at a recipe that will never be up to restaurant standard but which is recognizably a curry and is certainly more flavorful than plain food.

And the key to it is simple:  You have to use curry powder and you have to use a LOT of it.  My recipe is below.  The curry powder I use is "Clive of India" from my local supermarket but I am sure "Keens" and others are as good

Ingredients:

2 breasts of skinless chicken, chopped up (about .6 of a kg)

50 grams of curry powder (about half of the container)

A small quantity of coriander

A heaped teaspoon of crushed garlic

1 chopped onion

A full can of canned tomatoes

Salt to taste

Directions:

I just toss all the ingredients together into a small crockpot (slow cooker) with about half a tumbler of water,  mix it together with my hands and leave it on "High" for 3 hours.  It should boil gently after 2 hours, ensuring that any bacteria are dead. It is a very "safe" meal.

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Comments?  Email me  here.  My Home Page is here or here.

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An adventure with mince (aka ground beef)

I have got lots of packets and bottles of stuff in my kitchen for making "easy" meals.  Very little of it ever gets used. I think I have had some of it for over 10 years.  So I decided to do something about it.  I would become a packet cook!

My first effort was to get out my little tin of Keen's curry powder, which was once found in every Australian household.  It made curry suitable for people who were used to "plain food".  I cooked up some mince and onions, added Keen's toward the end and got a passable meal of mince.  There was only the faintest taste of curry to it, however.  So I tried again

My theory was that I should first marinate the mince in Keens.  So I converted a pound of mince into a slurry by adding water and stirring with my fingers (Indian!).  I then added 4 dessert spoons of Keen's and left it to marinate for about 8 hours.  I also added salt, two small chopped onions and a handful of mixed dried fruit.  I was looking for some stock to add to give it more body but I could not find any so added a dessert spoon of Bisto (normally used for making gravy)

I put the lot into my electric frypan with water and butter, stirred until everything looked to be cooked through (about 10 minutes).  And I STILL got no real curry taste in the result.  It was very nice mince though.  So my mad methods did produce a good result -- just not the result intended.