I love a saag dish. Over the years it’s a dish I’ve been drawn towards more. I’ve always been a fan of spinach so to be able to cook this and be the main feature of a curry fascinates me. This method again is different to the restaurant/ takeaway version as it uses no base sauce…….its the perfect home cooking version 👍 it’s a simple dish to create and again would take you less time to make it from scratch than picking up the phone to your local takeaway and having it delivered. I would recommend anyone having a go. It’s also a good dish you can cook ahead of friends coming around, leave to cool then reheat later finishing it with the yogurt.

Even though I’ve used lamb, you can use any alternative, a big favourite of mine is paneer, saag paneer….hungry now thinking about that dish.

Ingredients for the meat cooking –

1 tbsp of rapeseed oil, a standard pack of diced supermarket lamb, small cinnamon stick, 3 cardamom pods, 2 cloves, 1/2 tsp of ground cumin, 1/2 tsp of ground coriander, 1 tsp of paprika, 1 onion just cut into quarters, 3 cups of water.

Ingredients for the curry –

4 tbsp of rapeseed oil, 2 teaspoons onions finely diced, 2 tsp of garlic paste, 3 tbsp of garlic and ginger paste, 1 large heaped tbsp of ground coriander, 1 tbsp of curry powder, 1 tbsp of garam masala, 1 tsp of paprika, 1 tsp of Kashmiri chilli powder, 200g (Half a tin) of chopped tomatoes, a large bag of spinach leaves, 3-6 green finger chillies depending on how much heat you want running through this dish, a large handful of fresh coriander 2 tbsp of natural yogurt, good pinch of salt and juice of a lemon.

Method –

Heat a large pan, add the rapeseed oil and brown the lamb, this will only take a few minutes.

Stir in the ground spices, whole spices and the onions pieces.

Add the water, bring this to a simmer simmering for 20 minutes.

Once the stock has simmered for 20 minutes your lamb will be nice and tender.

Drain off the contents. remove the onion and whole spices. Set the lamb aside and keep the reserved stock below as this adds your flavour contents. Reserved stock below.

Clean your pan down with kitchen roll. Heat the remaining rapeseed oil. When the oil is hot add in your finely chopped onions. Cook these for 5 minutes until nice and translucent.

Add in your garlic, garlic & ginger pastes stirring it through the pan to coat the onions.

Stir in the ground spices – coriander, curry powder, 2 tsp (only at this stage) of the garam masala, the paprika & chilli powder.

Stir the spices in and add the chopped tomatoes. Plus about 100ml of the reserved cooking stock.

Mix this all together, then remove from the heat and blend with a hand blender.

Return the blended sauce to the heat.

Add the remaining cooking stock bringing it back to a simmer.

The sauce will start to caramelise around the side of the pan. Make sure you scrape this back into the sauce as the flavour is amazing. Add the lamb back in bring back to a rolling simmer.

Whilst the lamb and sauce is coming back to a simmer. Add the spinach, green chilled and fresh coriander to a hand blender. Whizz all of this up so it looks like Kermit has fell into the blender.

As the sauce and lamb mix thickens add the blended spinach, chilli’s and coriander mix giving it a good stir.

To finish the dish, add the natural yogurt, a little at a time, salt, lemon juice and remaining garam masala.

The natural yogurt does take this dish to another level believe it or not.

The final dish was served with a shop bought naan bread to mop up the flavours & steamed rice.

Final dish ❤️

Thank you for reading my ramblings if you have.

Again, inspiration taken from Dan Toombs.

Thank you 🙏