chicken curry and cumquat pudding

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No, not all at once.
And yes, it does so go together.

First, with inspiration from curry queen Madhur Jaffrey's ultimate curry bible, was the chicken curry in cashew-cononut sauce (from Sri Lanka), paired with cauliflower in a mustard seed sauce. And rice. Fragrant, loads of spice -- I love the fact Jaffrey goes for whole handfuls of all sorts of spices in her curries (and when she doesn't, we do) -- none of this pinch of this and quarter teaspoon of that . It makes the sauces rich and thick and delicious. Plenty of sauce left over for dipping roti for a weekend breakfast.

Then -- and just because we still had candied cumquats still, made from the last of the cumquat crop -- we had Maggie Beer's steamed cumquat and almond pudding, topped with candied cumquats. With cream. There was some soy milk ice cream in the freezer. The person who originally brought it into the house apologised for bringing it as soon as he tasted it, and warned us that it was inedible and should be thrown out immediately. But the lads had to taste it anyway, and it was variously described as tasting like plastic ice cream and whipped fat. In any case, totally vile.

Back to the pudding. I love a good steamed pudding, but it still feels odd to have to make a dessert at 3 so you can cook it for 4-5 hours and eat it at 8pm. Still, it's comforting to hear it rattling away in its pot all afternoon. We didn't have a trivet to keep it off the bottom of the pot, so I used a collection of egg rings. Worked just fine.

It's only the second time I've ever made a steamed pudding (I was always a main course kind of girl, not a sweets one), so seeing it come out of its pudding basin looking all perfect is a matter of considerable pride. Next stop, sticky date pudding.

And then, finally, chocolate. Because there's always chocolate. And maybe a small something as a digestif. frozen vodka ...