Adventures on Curry Mile – Long Dudi Recipe

Food shopping on the curry mile can feel a bit like you’ve been transported back to your gap year; rows of mysterious fruits and vegetables stacked up on the street, a bollywood soundtrack and questionable food-hygiene standards, or at least it does until the famous Manchester drizzle starts to dampen the dragon fruit. It’s easy to overlook the exotic fare on the curry mile, but the rewards for experimenting with an enigmatic vegetable are worth feeling a little embarrassed when you can’t pronounce the main ingredient of your new signature dish. This week we picked up a (comically named) long dudi, what appeared to be something of a courgette/butternut squash /potato hybrid which gently secreted a red liquid when cut. The Dudi is a technological rarity with almost no Google presence, so after a bit of experimentation we came up with this tasty simple student curry:

Ingredients

½ Long Dudi, chopped into chunks
2 chopped carrots
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 dried red chilli
Salt & pepper
1 finely chopped onion
1 tbsp veg. oil
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp garam masala
200ml coconut cream
2 heaped tbsps ground almonds
1 handful of raisins
juice of  1/2 lemon

Instructions:

1. Heat the oil in a pan.
2. Add the ground coriander, pepper, turmeric and garam masala and stir fry for about 1-minute over a low heat.
3. Turn up the heat, add the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli and stir fry for 5 minutes.
4. Add the long dudi and the carrot and continue to stir fry for another 7 minutes.
5. Add the coconut cream, ground almonds and raisins.
6. Reduce heat to low, cover the pan and simmer for 10 minutes.
7. Remove from heat, add lemon juice and salt to taste. Serve with basmati rice.