Sunday was lovely.

I finished listening to ‘Someone else’s shoes’ and I have gone back to ‘Hope and Glory’. It was the soundtrack to my afternoon of laundry 🧺, tidying, ironing and cooking.

And what was I preparing in my sun filled kitchen this Sunday? Another curry! I follow another food blogger and catching up on her posts on Saturday evening I found a recipe that I thought I’d like to try /adapt. I was curious about adding peanut butter to a curry, I might have done it before years ago but not for a long time now. So I luxuriously made and ate the curry in a state of peace and tranquillity.

Roll forward to this week…

A week that launched itself with a number of grim stories of violence against women and girls. The headmistress and her daugther believed to have been shot by her father at a prestigious college in Epsom. I can’t even imagine what would have been going through the minds of this woman, Emma, and her daughter, Lettie. I expect they would have been terrified. Utterly terrified.

And then following this a video circulating on the internet of a young black school girl being assaulted by a group white children and adults. The event is being filmed and nobody, nobody is doing anything to help the girl being attacked. Some teaching staff eventually stroll into view and do not appear to be doing anything with any urgency, care or compassion. That poor poor girl. What must she have been thinking and feeling? Why did nobody help? How will she ever feel safe again? Why did they think it was OK to hurt her like that? As if her life didn’t matter, her existence, her being. It’s a pretty brutal video to watch. It is distressing. It’s distressing. It was sad and shocking to watch. It also made me think we are not safe. We never were. I don’t like the world we are living in, it’s menacing and ugly.

I hope that these three females get the justice they deserve.

Ingredients

1 tsp oil

1 onion, finely diced

1 tsp medium curry powder

1 can of green lentils

500ml chicken stock

3 tsp tomato puree

1 tsp brown sugar

4 florets of frozen broccoli 🥦

1 cup of of frozen peas

3 tsp crunchy peanut butter

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in a pan and once hot, add the onion cooking for a few minutes until soft.

2. Sprinkle over the curry powder and lentils mixing well before adding the tomato puree and veegtable stock. Leave on a medium heat to gently simmer for 13 minutes until the lentils are almost cooked.

3. Add the sugar, broccoli, pea and peanut butter mixing well and cooking for a further 5 minutes.

4. Serve with freshly cooked basmati rice 🍚

Reference: adapted from https://ablovesfood.wordpress.com/2022/12/18/prawn-lentil-and-pea-curry/