Cooking With Attitude: Stay home with Ruby

With Christmas just around the corner, the restaurants are getting busier and the cops are ever more vigilant about drink driving. So it's The Nosh Brothers to the rescue... courtesy of M&S

Why is it most people you find munching a curry in an Indian restaurant have had a skinful, and are loud and rude? Maybe because they've been to the pub first and are possibly overly-refreshed. (I am sure in Bombay you might find lots of pissed indians throwing up steak and kidney pie in the streets after a binge on lager).

It's a well-known fact that many people watch food programmes on TV and buy a ready-made dish to make later at home. This is fine, but often you can make better food yourself, given the will and the time. More often than not, demanding work and social schedules prohibit this, so supermarkets provide the obvious answer to those problems with chilled meals.

So to Marks & Spencer, famous for top-notch offerings. Originally, the advantage of their stuff was that you could lie at dinner parties and say you made it yourself.

Better still, M&S now have a brilliant new chilled range of "Haandi" dishes. This is a move on from "Balti" (a homespun idea originating more from Birmingham than Bombay), and is sophisticated in its approach. Balti (literally "bucket"), got its name from the stir-frying of the food in a balti - the steel, wok-style dish that it's cooked in. Haandi is a step further with the ingredients stir-fried in a metal or clay vessel, and then simmered in a spicy sauce - the one-pot dish is then served with flavoured rice.

The Nosh Brothers are no strangers to a good "Ruby" so, we tanked up on lager and tucked into a selection and were highly impressed. Reheating chicken breast meat is usually death to texture as well as taste but these performed excellently.

Now you can avoid the crush.

Selection currently available at pounds 2.99 (1 portion serving)

Royal Chicken (with saffron, potato, cream, almonds & coriander)

Chicken & Tamarind (sweet `n sour with sesame & mustard seeds)

Spicy Chicken & Tomato (hot with green chillis & curry leaves)

Pilau rice (with curry/coriander leaves & onion seeds - 99p)

The Nosh Brothers appear regularly on Carlton Food Network