Mr C and I decided to do another dish from the M&S curry bible that I bought him for Christmas this weekend after the success of the butter chicken. He chose the lamb with cinnamon-scented fenugreek sauce. This just left us with one, rather major question: what is fenugreek and where can you buy it in St Albans.
Wikipedia's fenugreek entry helped us to answer the first question. It seems that you can get either fenugreek leaves, which are used as a herb, or fenugreek seeds, which are a spice. For something that I'd never heard of before it seems to have a huge number of uses around the world, ranging from hair conditioning in India, to a substitute for maple syrup flavouring in the United States.
When it came to trying to get hold of some the supermarket let us down on this one. So earlier this evening we walked down to the shops on the Hatfield Road, a part of St Albans known for its ethnic shops. The Madina General Store solved our problem and gave us the choice of either fresh or dried fenugreek. They also had a vast amount of other herbs and spices all at fantastically cheap prices. Our friend S ad mentioned a gold-mine on the Hatfield Road for all ethnic cooking ingredients and it looks like we've found it. We'll be back!
Mr C's busy in the kitchen at the moment so fingers crossed that this is as tasty as the butter chicken was.
Thank you, Mrs C for your comment on my blog.
I had to laugh when I saw this fenugreek post. My son, who is a very fussy eater, threw me a recipe when he was last livinhg at home a couple of years ago, for butter chicken curry and said he thought it looked like something he would enjoy.I still have the big box of fenugreek leaves in the cupboard..unopened.