I was watching a vlog the other day and the lass in it was cooking. It was just a video section of the vlog with no voice-over, just music. She put some small potatoes on to boil and then, in a bowl, she added all kinds of spices, chopped chillies and what looked like oil and mixed it all up. The drained spuds made a reappearance and were tipped into this bowl of goodies and were completely bathed in it. The well-dressed tatties were then poured into one of those multi-purpose Ninja things and, I presume, air-fried. They. Looked. Delicious. I just wanted to dive into the bowl of spuds, now crisped up to perfection, and scarf the lot.

Po-tay-toes

No mention was made of what she had cooked at all and I was thinking that I was going to have to write a comment enquiring about this potato recipe when we cut to another day and she is digging spuds up from the garden; she brings them into the kitchen and says “I can’t stop eating Dishoom’s gunpowder potatoes.” Reader, I wrote this down.

It took two different pieces of software to get this picture the correct shade of blue. Two! The lighting here is abysmal.

Now, I live in a small dot in the middle of nowhere but I have heard of Dishoom and know it to be an Indian restaurant, so I assumed that they had written a cookery book otherwise how would the lass in the vlog be cooking their spud recipe? First stop was Amazon; I don’t buy from them but they are a good place for checking whether a book is real or not and there are mostly reliable reviews which confirmed for me that it was the right book (they also have a list making facility which is useful for keeping track of books that I want). The book was 20 quid which is probably average for a hardback cookery book. I’m not paying that though and I went looking for a second-hand copy.

Map!

I found a reasonably priced one in World of Books’ eBay store so I ordered that and only had to wait a couple of days for it to arrive. It was in really good condition; there’s a map folded behind the front cover which looked like it had never been unfurled.

It is the best kind of cookery book because it has stories in between the recipes. It is like a love letter to Mumbai (they say Bombay in the book but I don’t want to invite those kinds of comments, you know the ones I mean) and the photos, oh the photos are glorious. If I'd never wanted to visit Mumbai before then I would’ve after looking through this book.

The first recipe that fell open was for pineapple and pink peppercorn jam which sounds deliriously good and is definitely on my to make list. Also, the bacon naan roll is pretty high up on the priorities. I haven’t gone through with my little sticky tabs yet to mark out the recipes I want to try, I shall probably do that as I’m reading through all the stories. I am really glad I bought it though, definitely a tenner well-spent.

PS: You have no idea how many times I typed cokkery instead of cookery. Every. Single Time.