Aagrah, Shipley

The Aagrah is a traditional curry house, done on an impressive scale. The group now includes twelve restaurants, with sites across West Yorkshire and a couple in South Yorkshire. A new flagship restaurant has just opened in glamourous Leeds, serving a 'taster' style menu. Tapas from the sub-continent.

Shipley is the flagship restaurant, a two storey ex-bike dealership with an a la carte menu downstairs and a buffet upstairs. The menu is Kashmiri, with most of the normal Asian restaurant dishes present, but executed in a more polished and assured way than normal.

We ate there on Saturday, a quick, late-night meal after a gig in town. Arriving at 11pm, the restaurant was still busy. We were seated quickly and brought popadoms, with a fairly unexciting selection of dips. Some Cobra redressed the balance.

Straight to main courses - I had a lamb pasanda, a rich dish heavy with garlic, yoghurt, onions and tomatoes, finished with fresh coriander leaves. It was excellent, spicy and deep, with a complex blend of flavours. Clearly a curry that has had a lot of thought put into it.

A creamy lamb makhani was lighter on the chilli but laced with pepper - an impressive mild dish. Naan breads were large, covered in garlic and fresh and hot from the tandoor.

It's hard to fault food this good. The Aagrah's food is consistently superb.

We finished eating, and as it was late, passed on dessert (a weak point in any Indian restaurant, this being no exception).

From nowhere, three waiters appeared and whisked our empty plates away with speed and precision that made me wonder if they'd been trained by the SAS in stealth waiting skills. It was quite startling - they managed to clear a table of six in under twenty seconds.

Maybe it was too late and they just wanted to clear the restaurant down, but the whole Ninja service thing just seemed a bit rude. I know that even waiters need to sleep, sometimes, but still, I don't like feeling like I'm being turfed out of a restaurant, especially after a faultless meal.

Aagrah House

4 Saltaire Road

Shipley

BD18 3HN

01274 530880

www.aagrah.com

Skinny man steals chocolate

"Two teenagers, one skinny and one stocky, are being hunted after a haul of chocolate bars was stolen from a lorry parked in Bradford last night.
The suspects got into the lorry, which was in a car park off Tong Street, through unlocked back doors and stole two ten kilo boxes of Bounty bars, valued at £50. "

Bradford Telegraph & Argus

The police are going to have trouble here - the skinny one isn't likely to be that skinny once he's ploughed through 20 kilos of Bounty bars.

Don't Tell Titus, Saltaire

Sir Titus Salt built the model village of Saltaire between 1850 and 1875 to house the workers from his enormous and imposing Italianate mill.

Eight hundred and fifty houses were built for Salt's workers, each with fresh water, a gas supply and an outside lavatory, amenities that, in the dark of the industrial North, bordered on Utopian. Salt also provided a beautiful church, a dining hall, a park, a hospital and a town hall, guarded by Peace, War, Determination and Vigilance - stone lions originally destined for Trafalgar Square, but which proved too small for the capital. Every night, on the stroke of midnight, the Saltaire lions trot down to the river Aire for a drink.

The superb conditions came with rules. Salt banned unions and housed different ranks of mill worker on the same streets, so that the management could watch over the workers. He banned gambling, political demonstrations, unofficial games of football and drinking.

Saltaire was teetotal, and stayed that way until very recently.

Don't Tell Titus plays on the village creator's sobriety. The bar and restaurant are housed in two of the shops on Saltaire's main street, across from the mill. Salt would not have been pleased to see a bar in his village, but he might have enjoyed the food, and he'd be delighted with Saltaire's rebirth thanks to the joint forces of David Hockney and the late Jonathan Silver, and particularly Silver's purchase and inspired re-purposing of Salt's enormous mill as both the headquarters of Pace Technology and the home of the world's largest collection of Hockney's work.

Don't Tell Titus opened a few years ago, rising on the increasing gentrification of the village and prospered as a bar, later expanding into the premises next door following the demise of the dire Beeties. A large, first floor restaurant was added as part of the expansion.

The bar is all wood, wine and Belgian beer, with a sleek look and a decent bar menu covering the usual 'plates to share'. The upstairs dining room is atmospheric, with some excellent pictures of the village and a lot of candles. Don't Tell Titus looks smart in a way that fits well into an area with such a strong identity.

Given it was a Wednesday night, the restaurant was quiet...too quiet, really, and we'd have been better off eating downstairs in the bar. Despite this, we were given a corner table next to a sash window. Very cosy.

We had a quick meal, just a main course each...a well executed steak with some inch-thick chips and a simple salad of lettuce with parmesan and a superb Toulouse sausage served with lentils, beans and a sweet potato mash. The lentils were slightly over seasoned - a little too much pepper - but the grilled sausage was excellent.

The menu is standard brasserie, with a few curries and Indian dishes added. Service is friendly and consistent and prices are reasonable, with main courses between about £8 and £12.

Highly recommended, both as a bar and a restaurant.

Don’t tell Titus…

6 Victoria Road

Saltaire

Bradford

BD18 3LA

01274 595633

info@donttelltitus.co.uk

www.donttelltitus.co.uk

Roast partridge with chard and bacon

These partridge came from the local butcher, and were tucked in between the pheasant and rabbits. It's officially autumn.

Partridge aren't as intensely 'gamey' as some of the larger birds. The meat is much darker than chicken, but isn't as strongly flavoured as pheasant. It's a nice compromise. A game bird for people who don't really like game.

Roasting a partridge takes about 25 to 30 minutes, the first half at a very high temperature (230c), the second at a more sedate 180c or so. Preparation is easy - salt, pepper, smother in butter. Resting the birds after cooking for a good ten minutes helps enormously.

We ate the partridges with a simple saute of bacon, chard and mushrooms. Fry some chopped bacon in oil until crispy, then add some quartered chestnut mushrooms (they have to be chestnut, button mushrooms just won't do). Wash the chard and remove any tough stalks, then slice the leaves into thin ribbons before shaking away any excess water. Add to the pan with salt and pepper and allow to wilt over a medium heat. Adjust the seasoning.

Serve each bird on a bed of chard and pour over some of the pan juices. You could get fancy and make a sauce by deglazing the roasting tin with some red wine, but not on a Tuesday night.

I loved this dish - a whole bird to yourself, to be picked over and gnawed at. Messy and satisfying. Jen thought it too 'fiddly', but she's never really liked game anyway. Bonus leftovers for me!

Lamb curry with onions and raisins

A common Indian, specifically Moghal, technique is to cook a lot of onions separately and add them to a curry dish during the last few minutes of cooking. This has the effect of substantially altering the taste and consistency of the dish...the end product is something of a surprise to the dilligent cook who has tasted at every stage.

This is one such example - a simple lamb curry that explodes into life in the last five minutes through the addition of sweet onions and raisins.

Quickly brown 1.5kg of cubed lamb shoulder in hot oil. Brown just a few pieces at a time to prevent the meat steaming in it's own juices.

Meanwhile, coarsely chop two onions, five cloves of garlic and a 5cm long by 2.5cm wide chunk of peeled ginger in a blender. A little water will be needed to produce a smooth paste.

Pour the onion paste into the empty meat pan and cook over a medium heat, stirring and scraping constantly. Make sure everything that became welded to the bottom of the pan during the browning process is incorporated into the onions.

Add one tablespoon of ground coriander, two teaspoons of ground cumin and a teaspoon of turmeric and fry for a little longer before adding three heaped tablepoons of yoghurt, a spoon at a time, stirring throughout.

Next add a peeled and chopped tomato (one from a can will be just fine). Keep frying, stirring and scraping. The onions will need about ten minutes in total and will turn a deep golden colour.

Tip the browned meat and all it's juices back into the pan, with one and a half teaspoons of salt and half a teaspoon each of ground cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Add a small amount of cayenne pepper, maybe about a quarter of a teaspoon, or as much as you dare. A good few turns of the pepper mill will also help.

Top the meat up with some water, maybe half a pint or so and let simmer for at least an hour.

Slice a ridiculous number of onions, at least five or six and fry them in oil in a large pan. The onions need to be browned, but not crisp. This will take at least ten minutes.

After an hour, check to see if the lamb is tender, and if it is, add the fried onions and two or three tablespoons af raisins or sultanas and let the curry simmer for another five minutes. You may need to quickly reduce the curry over a high heat before adding the onions and raisins, if there seems to be too much liquid.

Serve with plain rice and any type of Indian bread.

From Madhur Jaffrey's The Essential Madhur Jaffrey

Chocolate praline truffle cake

This is a very heavy duty chocolate cake...a huge slab of chocolate punctuated with praline and nuts. There is nothing light here, but much to enjoy.

A Nigel Slater recipe, from the Observer.

Toast 100g of shelled and skinned hazlenuts in a dry pan until golden. Keep the nuts moving - they'll burn in an instant.

Put 80g of caster sugar in another pan and heat over a moderate flame until melted. Watch the pan like a hawk - the sugar will burn faster than the nuts. When the sugar has melted and turned into a caramel, add the nuts and quickly tip the lot out onto an oiled baking tray, spreading the mixture evenly. It will set quickly.

Melt 350g of the best dark chocolate you can get your hands on, minimum 70 percent cocoa solids in a bowl over a pan of hot water. Don't stir it around too much. Just let it melt.

When the chocolate has melted, add a couple of tablespoons of hot water and then 85g of diced butter. Nigel beats his butter until soft, but I played fast and loose with his learned instructions and just chopped it up a bit and dumped it into the chocolate, mixing it a couple of times to amalgamate everything. Nothing came to any harm.

Add a small (or large) amount of rum to the chocolate, if you're so inclined.

Next, whip 170ml of double cream until the peaks are soft and fold into the chocolate.

Put the by now rock hard praline mixture into a plastic bag and batter with rolling pin until well broken up. Aim for 'large gravel' rather than 'dust'. Mix the praline into the chocolate.

Pour the mixture into a bread tin lined with clingfilm and refrigerate overnight or until properly set. The cake should slip easily out of the tin onto a waiting plate.

The cake is rich and heavy, and should be served in thin slices. You won't be able to eat much in one go.

Moroccan spiced lamb shanks with aubergine

Everybody has a couple of cookbooks that are just a little bit more stained and greasy than the rest, books that have seen more distinguished service than all the others on the shelf. I have two - the distinctly unfashionable Delia's complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith, which I grew up with and still refer to for basic advice on how to do things that I really should know how to do properly, but don't, and Nigel Slater's Real Cooking.

Real Cooking was first published in 1997, and was one of the first cookbooks I bought for myself. I bought it as much for the writing, which is concise and elegant, as for the recipes, but it's those recipes that really shine. Flicking through the pages, I realise that this is the book I've cooked the most from over the years...it falls open naturally at recipes I've cooked over and over again. Real, quality food. The split pea soup with a Moroccan spiced butter is superb and will be making a kitchen comeback soon.

Tonight, though, it's another Moroccan inspired dish of lamb shanks and aubergines, an easy, one-pot dish that you can put together in half an hour then leave alone for a couple more in the oven.

Dust two lamb shanks in flour and brown in some olive oil. Set aside, and quickly brown an aubergine, sliced lengthways and then chopped up into hefty chunks. Keep the pieces large so that they'll keep their shape later in the pot. The aubergines will suck up all the olive oil.

Remove the aubergines when browned and add three medium sized sliced onions to the pan, with three cloves worth of sliced garlic, cooking gently until pale and transparent. A bit more oil will be needed. make sure to scrape around the pan, lifting up any lamby bits from the bottom of the pan, vital for the finished sauce.

Add a tin of chopped plum tomatoes, a good tablespoon of tomato puree, two teaspoons of harissa paste and a cinammon stick (which I forgot!). Return the lamb and aubergines to the pan and top up with water so that the shanks are just covered. It's best to use a pan that fits everything snugly.

Season with salt and pepper and place in a warm oven (about 170 degrees) for at least two hours. Don't touch for at least an hour, then skim any excess fat and generally poke the lamb about a bit.

The lamb may need some more time, but when it's ready, falling off the bone, adjust the seasoning and serve with some crusty bread.

I know that lamb shanks are a bit out of fashion right now, something of a mid-nineties throwback, but there's still something special about serving such a neat self contained portion of tender meat in a tasty sauce.

And the sauce...the sauce is the real star of the show. Great over the lamb, the sauce is excellent with pasta the next day, or even as a soup, deep with the concentrated flavour of lamb. You should get at least one bonus meal out of that one pot.