I love spices, I love buying them, I love the smell of them, I love cooking with them. They are one of my favorite things when it comes to food. They are fantastic at adding flavor into your meals but they also have some great health properties - take ginger known for it's role in aiding digestive uses, particularly nausea or turmeric considered for it's properties in protecting against cognitive decline.
Most of the time I like to keep my supplies well stocked and tend to have around 25 herbs and spices at anyone time - why so many, well I make all my own home made curries (Indian and Thai) and I'm starting to experiment with more Mexican dishes, so having a stock of spices always comes in handy. Buying spices can be a little pricey to start with, but luckily they last and store well, plus you don't really need to have all of them.
If making your own homemade Indian curries spikes your interest, I'd suggest stocking up on at least the following;
Spices:
Spices:
- Coriander
- Turmeric
- Chili powder
- Cumin
- Cinnamon
- Curry powder
- Herbs - especially cilantro, known as coriander in the UK
- Ginger
- Garlic
Extras:
- Onion seeds
- Mustard seeds
- Garlic powder
- Ginger powder
- Nutmeg
- Cardamon (if you can find it)
While I've been making my own curries for the last three years, I've never considered making my own spice blend. No excuse, no real reason why. So when I came across this article from Woman's Health on DIY Spice Blends I thought, well why the hell not. The article has a great collection of 9 spices designed to help loose weight - which is a great added benefit of spices. The one I'm sharing is a curry blend, which those the spices it uses will be excellent for an Indian curry.
Curry Blend
2 tablespoons of cumin powder
2 tablespoons of ground coriander
2 tablespoons of turmeric
1 1/2 teaspoons of ground cardamon*
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
* Cardamon isn't always the easiest spice to find, but you can use a mix of cinnamon and nutmeg - equal parts of each to make an alternative.
Spice blenders are basically some of the easiest recipes of literally just mixing all the ingredients together and away you go. If you like your curries a mild to medium spice, work with using about 1/2 a tablespoon of the blend.
What about you? Do you love your spices too?!
What about you? Do you love your spices too?!
I love spices too and love making my own blends. Recently I purchased lots of aniseed for Christmas recipes and other delicious goodies.
ReplyDeleteAndreea | http://catsfika.blogspot.ro/
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O that sounds delicious! I know aniseed features in a lot of curries, need to give that a try sometime!
Deleteand not a lot of people know this outside of Scandinavia, but ground cardamom is amazing in baked things like cinnamon rolls or cardamom muffins! But it can be tricky to find - I have had to import the ground version of the spice from Norway
ReplyDeleteThat's so interesting to know! I rarely see cardamom in stores, I think it might be due to the price, who knows. Think I'm going to have to buy some off the internet, saying that, mixing the nutmeg/cinnamon equivalent works well for now at least.
DeleteThis is awesome, so useful!! Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI love playing with spices too. They can really transform your food!
ReplyDeleteSarah
Midwest Darling
That's so odd - I typed out a whole comment and then it just disappeared! Weird... Anyway, I was saying about how my husband and I love to make curry from scratch too and we have built up quite a collection of spices - so much so, that we don't have space to store them all anymore. Need to make a spice rack I think...!
ReplyDeleteOwl Girl | A London lifestyle blog
I use to have all mine out on my collection of vintage spice racks I'd picked up at estate sales, I have about five of them I think lol. They use to all be up back when we lived in an apartment, but with our house, there's not so much spare wall space for hanging stuff. But we have a lazy Susan spinning cupboard so they are all in there at the moment with all my spices, another load of spares/doubles and oils. I'd love to have them all back out on display again but I'll probably have to knock down some wall cabinets first!
DeleteNow if you'd just translate that all to Dutch and I'd be good to go!
ReplyDeleteWe are slowly growing our little collection of spices. We tried to make our own fajita spice at some point and I need to try that again. With getting more into the cooking, we are buying more and more.
Only problem, is the accidental purchase of what we 'assume' is the right one... and then it's not. Damn.
Haha, that kinda sucks, you'll have to look online. Fajita spice sounds fun - that's the thing, once you start cooking and finding more recipes you like that justifies more of the spices then it gets into lots of fun.
DeleteI love spices too. I read the Penzey's catalog like it's a book, lol.
ReplyDeleteOoo i've never heard of Penzey's, signed up for their catalog, sounds like my kind of thing. But i'm the same the bulb catalogs already lol
DeleteI hate anything massively hot - but I love sweet spices like cinnamon :)
ReplyDeleteLizzie's Daily Blog
I love spices, but I'm honestly terrible about using them unless they're specifically called for in a recipe. When it comes to whipping up my own thing off-the-cuff, I tend to stick with just salt and pepper. I think it's partly because I forget anything else, partly because I'm intimidated to just start tossing stuff in! Haha, what if I make it inedible?
ReplyDeleteCat
http://oddlylovely.com
You know what, it's super rare that I use salt and pepper. It's weird, growing up salt rarely features in recipes and moving to the US it always surprises me how often it appears in things, even in baking so I just omit it. Paprika is always a good "just throw it in" kind of spice, you don't need a lot, just a hint and you get some great taste.
DeleteI love me some spices! I pretty much put cumin and coriander in everything I cook. I do want to make my own spice blend to easily throw into recipes :) x
ReplyDeleteJasmin Charlotte | UK Lifestyle Blog
Paprika tends to be my thrown in spice, for baking I love throwing in cinnamon and certainly all spice this time of year too.
DeleteI love spices! how boring would food be without them?? I don't know why I've never thought about making my own blend... definitely going to play around with some now!
ReplyDeleteJessica
the.pyreflies.org
It's interesting when you start digging around and you see all the blends you could make, certainly going to try making some more and playing around.
DeleteI love spices too! I just started experimenting with making my own curry dishes, it's a lot of fun. Plus it makes the house smell great!
ReplyDeleteOh so true especially with all the festive spices for Christmas and you have a pie baking - so good!
DeleteChili Powder. Garlic. Garlic Powder. Red Cayenne Pepper. My 4 go-to's that I use on a daily basis!!! Such a great post, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDelete~ Samantha
You're welcome, I love garlic, hate the constant smell of it (that and onions) on my hands mind!
DeleteOh, I love spices and herbs. I never have enough of them in my cupboard though! Haha. I love how just a wee pinch of something can totally make the flavours in a meal so much stronger.
ReplyDeleteDebi x
I LOVE my spices. The first thing I want to create in spring next year is a herb garden (I have it all very planned out). I have so many random spices now that I have collected - spices for bread, for pizza, for salmon as well as the classics - cinnamon, nutmeg, curry spices. I don't know what you think, but there are more options for spices on this continent?
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